Books

Books : reviews

Kunihiko Kaneko, Ichiro Tsuda.
Complex Systems: Chaos and Beyond: a constructive approach with applicatons in life sciences.
Springer. 2000

The necessity to study complex systems has been recognized in several branches of science, in particular biological science. Based on a background of physics and nonlinear dynamics, the authors propose a constructive approach and dynamic many-to-many relationship for such a study. The relevance of chaos to complex systems is discussed as a concept to overcome the antitheses between determinism and nondeterminism, order and randomness, and reductionism and holism. By presenting an information-theoretical viewpoint of chaos, phenomena and concepts in the network of chaos elements, the authors set out to find new methods to deal with biological networks, in particular the brain, and also to 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.