This book provides a good coverage of the recent developments and future directions in the study of dissipative systems. The primary thrust here is in exposing the reader to the frontiers of chaos, pointing out clues for further work in nonlinear science. With the aid of various types of mappings, the collapse of tori is investigated. The book contains much valuable introductory material and copious reference lists. Some notes on the historical development of the subject are interspersed in this volume.

Chaos in science has always been a fascinating realm since it challenges the usual scientific approach of reductionism. While carefully distinguishing between complexity, holism, randomness, incompleteness, nondeterminism and stochastic behaviour the authors show that, although many aspects of chaos have been phenomenologically understood, most of its defining principles are still difficult to grasp and formulate. Demonstrating that chaos escapes all traditional methods of description, the authors set out to find new methods to deal with this phenomenon and illustrate their constructive approach with many examples from physics, biology and information technology. While maintaining a high level of rigour, an overly complicated mathematical apparatus is avoided in order to make this book accessible, beyond the specialist level, to a wider interdisciplinary readership.

This book examines life not from the reductionist point of view, but rather asks the questions: what are the universal properties of living systems, and how can one construct from there a phenomenological theory of life that leads naturally to complex processes such as reproductive cellular systems, evolution and differentiation? The presentation is relatively non-technical to appeal to a broad spectrum of students and researchers.