This book contains the invited papers of an international symposium on Synergetics which was held at ZIF (Center for interdisciplinary research) at Bielefeld. Fed. Rep. of Germany. Sept. 24. -29 . • 1979. In keeping with our previous meetings. this one was truly interdisciplinary. Synergetic systems are those that can produce macroscopic spatial. temporal or functional structures in a self-organized way. I think that these proceedings draw a rather coherent picture of the present status of Synergetics, emphasizing this time theoretical aspects, although the proceedings contain also important con tributions from the experimental side. Synergetics has ties to many quite different disciplines as is clearly mirrored by the following articles. Out of the many ties I pick here only one example which is alluded to in the title of this book. Indeed, there is an important branch of mathematics called dynamic systems theory for which the problems of Synergetics might become an eldorado. While, undoubtedly, a good deal of dynamic systems had been motivated by mechanics, such as celestial and fluid dynamics, theory Synergetics provides us with a wealth of related problems of quite different fields, e. g. , lasers or chemical reaction processes. In order to become adequately applicable, in quite a number of realistic cases dynamic systems theory must be developed further. This is equally true for a number of other approaches.
