Both of the authors of this book are disciples and collaborators of the Brussels school of thermodynamics. Their particular domain of competence is the application of numerical methods to the many highly nonlinear problems which have arisen in the context of recent developments in the thermodynamics of irreversi ble processes: stability of states far from equilibrium, search for marginal critical states, bifwrcation phenomena, multiple stationnary states, dissipative structures, etc. These problems cannot in general be handled using only the clas sical and mathematically rigorous methods of...