Books

Short works

Books : reviews

Armin Bunde, Shlomo Havlin, eds.
Fractals in Science.
Springer. 1994

rating : 3.5 : worth reading
review : 16 June 1998

A collection of chapters on some recent applications of fractals, mainly to biology and chemistry.

(Includes a Mac disk of demo software.)

Contents

• A Brief Introduction to Fractal Geometry. 1994
A whistle-stop tour of fractal dimension, the Koch snowflake, Sierpinski gasket, Cantor dust, Julia sets, random walks, diffusion limited aggregation, and percolation
• Per Bak, Michael Creutz. Fractals and Self-Organized Criticality. 1994
An overview of self-organised criticality, and how it is that systems can move themselves into this state. A lot about sand piles.
• Sergey V. Buldyrev, Ary L. Goldberger, Shlomo Havlin, C.-K. Peng, H. Eugene Stanley. Fractals in Biology and Medicine: from DNA to the heartbeat. 1994
Recent progress applying fractal concepts to biology and medicine: lung airways, arterial system, cauliflower heads, neuron shape, viscous fingering, bacterial colony spread, information coding in DNA, heartbeats, evolutionary extinctions
• Janos Kertesz, Tamas Vicsek. Self-Affine Interfaces. 1994
Self-affine systems (self-similar, but with different scale factors along different directions): roughness of surfaces, growth of surfaces
• George H. Weiss. A Primer of Random Walkology. 1994
Brownian motion, diffusion. Random walks on a lattice, continuous-time random walk, random walks in disordered media.
• Mohamed Daoud. Polymers. 1994
Linear chains, self avoiding random walks, adsoption
• Sidney Redner, Francois Leyvraz. Kinetics and Spatial Organization of Competitive Reactions. 1994
Two species A and B reacting, A+B-->I, where I is inert
• David Avnir, Ricardo Gutfraind, Dina Farin. Fractal Analysis in Heterogeneous Chemistry. 1994
The structure and geometry of the reaction environment
• Dennis C. Rapaport, Martin Meyer. Computer Exploration of Fractals, Chaos, and Cooperativity. 1994
An overview of the accompanying software