Robert L. Dewar – författare

This book is primarily intended to enable postgraduate research students to enhance their understanding and expertise in Fluid Mechanics and Magnetohydrodynamics (MHD), subjects no longer treated in isolation. The exercises throughout the book often serve to provide additional and quite significant knowledge or to develop selected mathematical skills, and may also fill in certain details or enhance readers’ understanding of essential concepts. A previous background or some preliminary reading in either of the two core subjects would be advantageous, and prior knowledge of multivariate calculus and differential equations is expected.

This book is primarily intended to enable postgraduate research students to enhance their understanding and expertise in Fluid Mechanics and Magnetohydrodynamics (MHD), subjects no longer treated in isolation. The exercises throughout the book often serve to provide additional and quite significant knowledge or to develop selected mathematical skills, and may also fill in certain details or enhance readers’ understanding of essential concepts. A previous background or some preliminary reading in either of the two core subjects would be advantageous, and prior knowledge of multivariate calculus and differential equations is expected.

This book arose from a conference organized under the auspices of the Australian Research Council's Complex Open Systems Research Network (which has become the most prominent for complex systems in the world — just Google “complex systems network”), the ANU Centre for Complex Systems, and the Asia-Pacific Center for Theoretical Physics. The book is unique in the scope of its coverage of applications of complex systems science: Extraterrestrial — astrophysical, solar and space plasmas; Earth System — climate, ecosystems; Human systems — brain dynamics, social networks, financial statistics, advanced technologies.It also presents up-to-date discussions of new theoretical approaches, in particular those based on entropy and entropy production maximization, a field still under development but with much promise for providing a much-needed unifying principle for complex systems science.The authors are at the forefront of their fields, and organized their chapters to effectively bring out common features of complex systems. A comprehensive and common lexicon of keywords has been used to unify indexing, thus making the book an invaluable introduction to anyone seeking an overview of complex systems science.