Complex and Adaptive Dynamical Systems: A Primer (Springer Complexity)

Helping us understand our complex world, this book presents key findings in quantitative complex system science. Its approach is modular and phenomenology driven. Examples of phenomena treated in the book include the small world phenomenon in social and scale-free networks; life at the edge of chaos; the concept of living dynamical systems; and emotional diffusive control within cognitive system theory. Each chapter includes exercises to test your grasp of new material. Written at an introductory level, the author provides an accessible entry for graduate students in physics, mathematics, and theoretical computer science.

We are living in an ever more complex world, an epoch where human actions can accordingly acquire far-reaching potentialities. Complex and adaptive dynamical systems are ubiquitous in the world surrounding us and require us to adapt to new realities and the way of dealing with them.

This primer has been developed with the aim of conveying a wide range of "commons-sense" knowledge in the field of quantitative complex system science at an introductory level, providing an entry point to this both fascinating and vitally important subject.

The approach is modular and phenomenology driven. Examples of emerging phenomena of generic importance treated in this book are:

-- The small world phenomenon in social and scale-free networks.

-- Phase transitions and self-organized criticality in adaptive systems.

-- Life at the edge of chaos and coevolutionary avalanches resulting from the unfolding of all living.

-- The concept of living dynamical systems and emotional diffusive control within cognitive system theory.

Technical course prerequisites are a basic knowledge of ordinary and partial differential equations and of statistics. Each chapter comes with exercises and suggestions for further reading - solutions to the exercises are also provided.