This book is a collection of part of the written versions of the Physics Courses given at the Winter School "Order, Chance and Risk: Aperiodic Phenomena from Solid State to Finance" held at the Les Houches Center for Physics, between February 23 and March 6, 1998. The School gathered lecturers and participants from all over the world. On a thematic level, the content of the school can be viewed both as a continuation (aperiodic phenomena in solid state physics) and an extension (mathematical aspects of fmance and economy) of the previous "Beyond Quasicrystals," also held at Les Houches, March...

This book is the collection of most of the written versions of the Courses given at the Winter School "Beyond Quasicrystals" in Les Houches (March 7-18, 1994). The School gathered lecturers and participants from all over the world and was prepared in the spirit of a general effort to promote theoretical and experimental interdisciplinary communication between mathematicians, theoretical and experimental physicists on the topic of the nature of geometric order in solids beyond standard periodicity and quasi periodicity. The overall structure of the book reflects the wish of the editors to pose...

Numerical large-eddy simulation techniques are booming at present and will have a decisive impact on industrial modeling and flow control. The book represents the general framework in physical and spectral space. It also gives the recent subgrid-scale models. Topics treated include compressible turbulence research, turbulent combustion, acoustic predictions, vortex dynamics in non-trivial geometries, flows in nuclear reactors and problems in atmospheric and geophysical sciences. The book addresses numerical analysts, physicists, and engineers.

The 1997 Les Houches workshop on "Dynamical Network in Physics and Biology" was the third in a series of meetings "At the Frontier between Physics and Biology". Our objective with these workshops is to create a truly interdisciplinary forum for researchers working on outstanding problems in biology, but using different approaches (physical, chemical or biological). Generally speaking, the biologists are trained in the particular and motivated by the specifics, while, in contrast, the physicists deal with generic and "universal" models. All agree about the necessity of developing "robust"...

1 2 V. E. Zakharov and S. Wabnitz 1 L. D. Landau Institute for Theoretical Physics, 2 Kosygin Str., 117334 Moscow, Russia 2 Laboratoire de Physique, University of Bourgogne, 9 avenue A. Savary, 21078 Dijon, France After about a quarter of a century since the first theoretical predictions of op- tical solitons, the industrial application of the optical soliton concept is near to reality in the booming field of modern telecommunications, where the de- mand for high-speed data transmission and routing is of ever-growing. This book contains a set of lectures that were presented at a Les Houches...

Starbursts are regions of unusually rapid star formation, often located in the central parts of galaxies. They differ from more normal regions of star formation in terms of the throughput of mass and the rapidity with which the gas is consumed. In the last twenty years, extensive observational data at most wavelengths have become available on starbursts, but many important issues remain to be addressed, observationally as well as theoretically. How are strong episodes of star formation triggered? What is the quantity of gas converted into stars during bursts? What is the initial mass function...