Encyclopedia of Complexity and Systems Science

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Авторы: ROBERT A.MEYERS

Издательство: SpringerScience+BuisinessMedia, LLC.

Год: 2006

Кол-во страниц: 3580

Формат: pdf

Размер: 194 Мб

Язык: английский

The Encyclopedia of Complexity and System Science is an authoritative single source for understanding and applying the basic tenets of complexity and systems theory as well as the tools and measures for analyzing complex systems in science, engineering and many areas of social, financial and business interactions. It is written for an audience of advanced university undergraduate and graduate students, professors, and professionals in a wide range of fields who must manage complexity on scales ranging from the atomic and molecular to the societal and global. Each article was selected and peer reviewed by one of our 36 Section Editors with advice and consultation provided by our 15 Board Members and Editor-in-Chief. This level of coordination assures that the reader can have a level of confidence in the relevance and accuracy of the information far exceeding that generally found on the World Wide Web. Accessablilty is also a priority and for this reason each article includes a glossary of important terms and a concise definition of the subject.

Complex systems are systems that comprise many interacting parts with the ability to generate a new quality of collective behavior through self-organization, e. g. the spontaneous formation of temporal, spatial or functional structures.

They are therefore adaptive as they evolve and may contain self-driving feedback loops. Thus, complex systems are much more than a sum of their parts. Complex systems are often characterized as having extreme sensitivity to initial conditions as well as emergent behavior that are not readily predictable or even completely deterministic. The conclusion is that a reductionist (bottom-up) approach is often an incomplete description of a phenomenon. This recognition, that the collective behavior of the whole system cannot be simply inferred from the understanding of the behavior of the individual components, has led tomany new concepts and sophisticated mathematical andmodeling tools for application to many scientific, engineering, and societal issues that can be adequately described only in terms of complexity and complex systems.