The surprising patterns of chaos and complexity are to be found in many areas of nature and science, examples ranging from cabbages to coastlines. Quite often, those who could benefit most from an understanding of the principles behind chaos and complexity, for example engineers, geologists, medics, chemists and physicists, are denied access to the power and wonders of the field by the mathematical and unnecessarily convoluted way the topic is usually presented. This work aims to open up the fascinating opportunities offered by an understanding of this field to the informed layman, using informative and amusing examples of the application of the principles accompanied by many descriptive figures demonstrating the beauty of a science which can now be understood by all.
Reihe
Sprache
Verlagsort
Zielgruppe
Für höhere Schule und Studium
Für Beruf und Forschung
Illustrationen
255 b&w and 2 colour figures, 43 tables
Maße
Gewicht
ISBN-13
978-3-527-29039-0 (9783527290390)
Schweitzer Klassifikation
Preparing for a journey through deterministic chaos and complex systems; Mandelbrot sets, Julia lace and Fatou dusts; the normal distribution of drunks; the rare events of cooperative chaos; Prussian horses and fishy statistics; rubber number logic and the swinging mouse; congregating drunks, soot and other pigments; infinite coastlines and other wiggly lines; invisible carpets, Swiss cheese and a slice of bread; a new wrinkle on surface fractals; Zipf's Law and other hyperbolic distributions; climbing fig trees to discover fascinating numbersl coincidences, clusters and catastrophes; mathematical watersheds and rooting around drainage basins; Fourier analysis, fractal dimension and formation dynamics.
