Daniel L. Stein is professor of physics and mathematics at New York University's Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences. His books include Spin Glasses and Biology. Charles M. Newman is professor of mathematics at NYU's Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences and at the University of California, Irvine. His books include Topics in Disordered Systems. Spin glasses are disordered magnetic systems that have led to the development of mathematical...

Chaos gets a bad rap. Few people realize that without the dynamics of chaos, order would not exist. In fact, nothing would exist. Without chaos, there would be no creation, no structure, and no existence. After all, order is merely the repetition of patterns; chaos is the process that establishes those patterns. L. K. Samuels goes beyond the normal boundaries studied by chaologists. It views science through a political and socioeconomic looking glass,...

Written when the young science of chaos was gaining a foothold in the scientific community, this book introduces the field's concepts, applications, theory, and technique. Suitable for advanced undergraduates and graduate students, researchers, and teachers of mathematics, physics, and engineering, the text's major prerequisite is familiarity with differential equations and linear vector spaces. Author S. Neil Rasband discusses the major models for...

Twelve-year-olds Oliver Beane and Frankie Figge are starting middle school in their suburban town of Lake Grove Glen, but from the beginning things seem a little weird, starting with the mysterious girl Matilda Sandoval who seems to know a lot about the boys, and continuing with a series of apparently random events that may not be random at all; somehow it all leads back to Preston Oglethorpe, a former student genius at their school who won the Nobel...

Would you like to have better solutions to your problems? Struggling to understand why things went wrong when you did everything right? Learn to Think in Systems can help you with these problems. Systems surround us and we might not even be aware of it. Your household is a system. The bakery on the corner is a system. Your class at school, your department at work, and your weekend soccer team made of wholehearted dads is a system too. You are a...

When Santa Fe Institute scientists first started working on economics more than thirty years ago, many of their insights, approaches, and tools were, considered beyond heterodox. These once-disparaged approaches included network economics, agents of limited rationality, and institutional evolution-all topics that are now increasingly considered mainstream. SFI continues to expand the boundary of our economic understanding by pioneering fields as diverse...

Invariant manifold theory serves as a link between dynamical systems theory and turbulence phenomena. This volume consists of research notes by author S. S. Sritharan that develop a theory for the Navier-Stokes equations in bounded and certain unbounded geometries. The main results include spectral theorems and analyticity theorems for semigroups and invariant manifolds. The treatment is suitable for researchers and graduate students in the areas...

An elegant, mind-bending introduction to Complexity Theory, the science of how complex systems behave-from cells to ecosystems to human beings-that illuminates the very nature of life itself. The great scientific revolutions of the early twentieth century-the Theory of Relativity and Quantum Mechanics-are well-known, but another theory of equal profundity was developed by mathematicians at the end of the last century: an outgrowth of Chaos Theory,...

Life is an enduring mystery. Yet, science tells us that living beings are merely sophisticated structures of lifeless molecules. If this view is correct, where do the seemingly purposeful motions of cells and organisms originate? In Life's Ratchet, physicist Peter M. Hoffmann locates the answer to this age-old question at the nanoscale. Below the calm, ordered exterior of a living organism lies microscopic chaos, or what Hoffmann calls the molecular...