J. C. Vassilicos - Böcker

In recent years there has been an explosion of interest in wavelets, in a wide range of fields in science and engineering and beyond. This book brings together contributions from researchers from disparate fields, both in order to demonstrate to a wide readership the current breadth of work in wavelets, and to encourage cross-fertilization of ideas. It demonstrates the genuinely interdisplinary nature of wavelet research and applications. Particular areas covered include turbulence, statistics, time series analysis, signal and image processing, the physiology of vision, astronomy, economics and acoustics. Some of the work uses standard wavelet approaches and in other cases new methodology is developed. The papers were originally presented at a Royal Society Discussion Meeting, to a large and enthusiastic audience of specialists and non-specialists.

The dynamics of many nonlinear systems gravitate around a few common central themes: intermittency, order/coherence and disorder. These features affect scalings and lead to deviations from Gaussian behaviour. Intermittency may be the universal outcome of a large class of nonlinear systems; however the universality properties of specific nonlinear systems, that is the dependencies of the intermittent structure on initial and boundary conditions, remain open questions. This volume consists of articles by prominent figures who all participated in a workshop held at the Newton Institute in Cambridge. It reflects the aims of the workshop, namely to capture and summarise recent developments, encourage cross-fertilisation of ideas, lay out research directions for the future and provide an overview of our current understanding of the subject.

The modern understanding of turbulence is that it is a collection of weakly correlated vortical motions, which, despite their intermittent and chaotic distribution over a wide range of space and time scales, actually consist of local characteristic 'eddy' patterns that persist as they move around under the influences of their own and other eddies' vorticity fields. Numerical simulations and experimental observations have now identified some forms and elements of 'life-cycles' of some of these structures. The articles in this volume, first published in 2000, examine a number of key questions that have engaged turbulence researchers for many years. Most involve mathematical analysis, but some describe numerical simulations and experimental results that focus on these questions. However, all are addressed to a wide cross-section of the turbulence community, namely mathematicians, engineers and scientists.

The modern understanding of turbulence is that it is a collection of weakly correlated vortical motions, which, despite their intermittent and chaotic distribution over a wide range of space and time scales, actually consist of local characteristic 'eddy' patterns that persist as they move around under the influences of their own and other eddies' vorticity fields. Numerical simulations and experimental observations have now identified some forms and elements of 'life-cycles' of some of these structures. The articles in this volume, first published in 2000, examine a number of key questions that have engaged turbulence researchers for many years. Most involve mathematical analysis, but some describe numerical simulations and experimental results that focus on these questions. However, all are addressed to a wide cross-section of the turbulence community, namely mathematicians, engineers and scientists.