Holger Kantz – författare

Significant, and usually unwelcome, surprises, such as floods, financial crisis, epileptic seizures, or material rupture, are the topics of Extreme Events in Nature and Society. The book, authored by foremost experts in these fields, reveals unifying and distinguishing features of extreme events, including problems of understanding and modelling their origin, spatial and temporal extension, and potential impact. The chapters converge towards the difficult problem of anticipation: forecasting the event and proposing measures to moderate or prevent it. Extreme Events in Nature and Society will interest not only specialists, but also the general reader eager to learn how the multifaceted field of extreme events can be viewed as a coherent whole.

The paradigm of deterministic chaos has influenced thinking in many fields of science. Chaotic systems show rich and surprising mathematical structures. In the applied sciences, deterministic chaos provides a striking explanation for irregular behaviour and anomalies in systems which do not seem to be inherently stochastic. The most direct link between chaos theory and the real world is the analysis of time series from real systems in terms of nonlinear dynamics. Experimental technique and data analysis have seen such dramatic progress that, by now, most fundamental properties of nonlinear dynamical systems have been observed in the laboratory. Great efforts are being made to exploit ideas from chaos theory wherever the data displays more structure than can be captured by traditional methods. Problems of this kind are typical in biology and physiology but also in geophysics, economics, and many other sciences.

Significant, and usually unwelcome, surprises, such as floods, financial crisis, epileptic seizures, or material rupture, are the topics of Extreme Events in Nature and Society. The book, authored by foremost experts in these fields, reveals unifying and distinguishing features of extreme events, including problems of understanding and modelling their origin, spatial and temporal extension, and potential impact. The chapters converge towards the difficult problem of anticipation: forecasting the event and proposing measures to moderate or prevent it. Extreme Events in Nature and Society will interest not only specialists, but also the general reader eager to learn how the multifaceted field of extreme events can be viewed as a coherent whole.

This book is more than a standard proceedings volume, although it is an almost direct result of the workshop on "Nonlinear Analysis of Physiologi­ cal Time Series" held in Freital near Dresden, Germany, in October 1995. The idea of the meeting was, as for previous meetings devoted to related topics, such as the conference on dynamical diseases held near Montreal in February 1994 (see CHAOS Vol. 5(1), 1995), to bring together experts on the techniques of nonlinear analysis and the theory of chaos and applicants from the most fascinating field where such methods could potentially be useful: the life sciences. The former group consisted mainly of physicists and mathe­ maticians, the latter was represented by physiologists and medical researchers and practitioners. Many aspects of this workshop were unusual and not previously expe­ rienced. Also, the hosting institution, the Max Planck Institute for Physics of Complex Systems (MPIPKS), at this time was brand new. The organiz­ ers'' rather unconventional intention was to bring specialists of both groups together to really work together. Therefore, there was an excessive availabil­ ity of computers and the possibility to numerically study time series data sets practitioners had supplied from their own fields, e. g. electrocardiogram (ECG) data, electroencephalogram (EEG) data, data from the respiratory system, from human voice, human posture control, and several others. These data formed a much stronger link between theoreticians and applicants than any of the common ideas.