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| Author(s) | Bountis, T. |
|---|---|
| Title | Chaotic Dynamics, Theory and Practice |
| Publisher | Plenum Press |
| Year of publication | 1992 |
| Reviewed by | Paul A. Blaga |
This book represents the proceedings of the NATO Advanced Science Institute, held at Patras, Greece, between July 11 - 20 1991. The goal of the Institute was twofold. On the one hand, to bring together experts from different fields of chaotic dynamics and, on the other hand, to offer to young graduate students and scientists the oportunity to expose their results and to discuss them with other, more advanced scientists. As a result, the proceedings contain first of all research papers belonging to these young scientists, and only few review papers, unlike other books of this kind.
From reasons clear to everyone, the editor divided the contents in two parts. The first part contains theoretical approaches, dealing with: complexity, control and data representation, fractals, multifractals and analicity of normal forms, integrability, Painlevé property and singularity analysis, as well as applications to statistical physics, celestial mechanics and cosmology. The second part is concerned with some applications of chaotic dynamics to concrete practical problems, taken from: controlling dynamical systems, semiconductors, superconductors, lasers and electronic circuits, biology, chemistry, atmospheric and magnetospheric dynamics. There is, also, a group of papers related to hamiltonian dynamics, dissipative dynamics and normal forms.
The book is produced from camera ready material and, from this point of view, it is not unitary, although, on the overage, there is sufficient information on each page. There is a subject index and, after each paper, there is a list of references.
The book is interesting for graduate students and scientists working in chaotic dynamics. The point is that a mathematician reader is, regulary, interested only in some papers from the first part, while someone from other field (say engineerieng or biology) is interested in other group of papers. It is for this reason thot this book could not be a good deal for an individual (even the price is much too high for only few papers). This is the fate of the books of this sort whose range of subjects is very large. Perhaps it goes without saying but It ought to be said that I speak about the subjects of the papers, not about their value, which could be (and really is, in some cases) high enough. However, for a library, the book could be a good aquisition.