It is two decades since Mitchell Feigenbaum's landmark papers on period doubling and the modern beginnings of what is now called "Chaos Theory." From the very beginning, mechanics has been a central focus for modem nonlinear dynamical systems. Fluid, structural, machine and rigid body dynamics has been a fertile field for nonlinear phenomena and chaos in particular. Early experimental evidence for chaotic phenomena in mechanics gave the new chaos theory a mark of credibility, importance, and relevance that its earlier sister field, catastrophe theory, did not achieve. The fact that mechanics...

Ah the Machine; both coveted and criticized, life sustaining and life destr- ing yet always a symbol of human creativity and invention from the Rena- sance to robotics from the Wright brothers to the Wankel engine. There are more than a billion mechanical machines in our world of six billion humans. These machines are the source of both marvel and mayhem in the life of our planet. This book is about the evolution of these machines and the inv- tors and engineers who created them from the early Renaissance to the early 20th century. I have chosen two personalities who are icons of these two...

Discoveries of chaotic, unpredictable behaviour in physical deterministic systems has brought about new analytic and experimental techniques in dynamics. The modern study of the new phenomena requires the analyst to become familiar with experiments (at least with numerical ones), since chaotic solutions cannot be written down, and it requires the experimenter to master the new concepts of the theory of nonlinear dynamical systems. This book is unique in that it presents both viewpoints: the viewpoint of the analyst and of the experimenter. In the first part F. Moon outlines the new...

This fascinating book will be of as much interest to engineers as to art historians, examining as it does the evolution of machine design methodology from the Renaissance to the Age of Machines in the 19th century.