This volume contains most of the lectures presented at the meeting held in Carry-le- nd Rouet from the 2 to the 4th June 1980 and entitled "Numerical Methods in the Study of Critical Phenomena." Scientific subjects are becoming increasingly differentiated, and the number of journals and meetings devoted to them is continually increasing. Thus it has become very difficult for the non-specialist to approach subjects with which he is not familiar. Hence the purpose of our meeting was to bring together scientists from different disciplines to study a common subject and to stimulate discussion'...

The best developed of today's kinetic theories are those for gases and completely ionized plasmas. In recent years, however, kinetic theories of more complicated systems - consisting of free particles as well as those bound in atoms, and an electromagnetic field - have played an increasingly important role. An example of such a system is a partially ionized plasma of gas discharges or in semicon- ductors. The main purpose of this book is the further development of the kinetic theory of systems of this kind. Naturally, it would be impossible to encompass at once all the problems con- cerning...

The concept of this book was developed during the Winter Seminar held in the Austrian mountains at the Alpengasthof Zeinisjoch, Tirol-Vorarlberg, from February 27 to March 3, 1988. Leading experts and advanced students in math- ematics, physics, chemistry and computer science met to present and discuss their most recent results in an informal seminar. These were the circumstances that led to the idea of compiling some of the essential contributions presented at this seminar together with others describing basic features of "optimal struc- tures in heterogeneous reaction systems." The aim of...

For four decades, information theory has been viewed almost exclusively as a theory based upon the Shannon measure of uncertainty and information, usually referred to as Shannon entropy. Since the publication of Shannon's seminal paper in 1948, the theory has grown extremely rapidly and has been applied with varied success in almost all areas of human endeavor. At this time, the Shannon information theory is a well established and developed body of knowledge. Among its most significant recent contributions have been the use of the complementary principles of minimum and maximum entropy in...

Over the past years the field of synergetics has been mushrooming. An ever- increasing number of scientific papers are published on the subject, and numerous conferences all over the world are devoted to it. Depending on the particular aspects of synergetics being treated, these conferences can have such varied titles as "Nonequilibrium Nonlinear Statistical Physics," "Self-Organization," "Chaos and Order," and others. Many professors and students have expressed the view that the present book provides a good introduction to this new field. This is also reflected by the fact that it has been...

Neuroscience is ripe for a paradigm change as Freeman and Mountcastle describe. Brain Oscillations provide an important key to this change. In this book the functional importance of the brain's multiple oscillations is treated with an integrative scope. According to the author, neurophysiology and cognition demand integrative approaches similar to those of Galilei and Newton in physics and of Darwin in biology. Not only the human brain but also lower brains and ganglia of invertebrates are treated with electrophysical methods. Experiments on sensory registration, perception, movement,...

Nine years have passed since I dispatched the second edition, and the book still appears to be in demand. The time may be ripe for an update. As the perhaps most conspicable extension, I describe the understanding of u- versal spectral ?uctuations recently reached on the basis of periodic-orbit theory. To make the presentation of those semiclassical developments selfcontained, I decided to to underpin them by a new short chapter on classical Hamiltonian mechanics. Inasmuch as the semiclassical theory not only draws inspiration from the nonlinear sigma model but actually aims at constructing...

Mathematical modelling is ubiquitous. Almost every book in exact science touches on mathematical models of a certain class of phenomena, on more or less speci?c approaches to construction and investigation of models, on their applications, etc. As many textbooks with similar titles, Part I of our book is devoted to general qu- tions of modelling. Part II re?ects our professional interests as physicists who spent much time to investigations in the ?eld of non-linear dynamics and mathematical modelling from discrete sequences of experimental measurements (time series). The latter direction of...

The analysis of neurophysiological brain function is a highly interdisciplinary field of research. In addition to the traditional areas of psychology and neurobiology, various other scientific disciplines, such as physics, mathematics, computer science, and engineering, are involved. The book reviews a wide spectrum of model-based analyses of neurophysiological brain function. In the first part, physical and physiological models and synergetic concepts are presented. The second part focuses on analysis methods and their applications to EEG/MEG data sets. It reviews methods of source...