Robert S. MacKay - Böcker

Complexity science is the study of systems with many interdependent components. Such systems - and the self-organization and emergent phenomena they manifest - lie at the heart of many challenges of global importance. This book is a coherent introduction to the mathematical methods used to understand complexity, with plenty of examples and real-world applications. It starts with the crucial concepts of self-organization and emergence, then tackles complexity in dynamical systems using differential equations and chaos theory. Several classes of models of interacting particle systems are studied with techniques from stochastic analysis, followed by a treatment of the statistical mechanics of complex systems. Further topics include numerical analysis of PDEs, and applications of stochastic methods in economics and finance. The book concludes with introductions to space-time phases and selfish routing. The exposition is suitable for researchers, practitioners and students in complexity science and related fields at advanced undergraduate level and above.

This book is adapted and revised from the author's seminal PhD thesis, in which two forms of asymptotically universal structure were presented and explained for area-preserving maps. Area-preserving maps are the discrete-time analogue of two degree-of-freedom Hamiltonian systems. How they work and much of their dynamics are described in this book. The asymptotically universal structure is found on small scales in phase-space and long time-scales. The key to understanding it is renormalisation, that is, looking at a system on successively smaller phase-space and longer time scales. Having presented this idea, the author briefly surveys the use of the idea of renormalisation in physics. The renormalisation picture is then presented as the key to understanding the transition from regular to chaotic motion in area-preserving maps. Although written ten years ago, the subject matter continues to interest many today. This updated version will be useful to both researchers and students.

This conference was the third meeting organized in the framework of the European LOCNET project. The main topics discussed by this international research collaboration were localization by nonlinearity and spatial discreteness, and energy transfer (in crystals, biomolecules and Josephson arrays).