Regular and Chaotic Dynamics (Applied Mathematical Sciences)

Book Description

This book treats nonlinear dynamics in both Hamiltonian and dissipative systems. The emphasis is on the mechanics for generating chaotic motion, methods of calculating the transitions from regular to chaotic motion, and the dynamical and statistical properties of the dynamics when it is chaotic. The book is intended as a self consistent treatment of the subject at the graduate level and as a reference for scientists already working in the field. It emphasizes both methods of calculation and results. It is accessible to physicists and engineers without training in modern mathematics. The new edition brings the subject matter in a rapidly expanding field up to date, and has greatly expanded the treatment of dissipative dynamics to include most important subjects. It can be used as a graduate text for a two semester course covering both Hamiltonian and dissipative dynamics.

Complex Systems: Chaos and Beyond, A Constructive Approach with Applications in Life Sciences

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Beyond Chaos but not Beyond Comprehension

Complex Systems: Chaos and Beyond, A Constructive Approach with Applications in Life Sciences
Kunihiko Kaneko , and Ichiro Tsuda
Manufacturer: Springer
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 3540672028

Book Description

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.

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Beyond Chaos but not Beyond Comprehension.......2000-12-22

This is a book I've long been waiting for. It gives an excellent overview of how the study of complex systems and chaos brings together various branches of science with a special focus on Physics and the Biological Sciences. The book is not too technical yet highly to the point with philosophical and fundamental discussions and thus of great value to both expert and novice.

Applied Nonlinear Dynamics and Stochastic Systems Near the Millennium : San Diego, Ca July 1997 (Conference Proceedings , Vol 411)

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Applied Nonlinear Dynamics and Stochastic Systems Near the Millennium : San Diego, Ca July 1997 (Conference Proceedings , Vol 411)

Manufacturer: American Institute of Physics
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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Book Description

It is clear from current applications in signal processing, lasers, molecular motors, and the control of biomedical anomalies, that nonlinear dynamics pervades systems that we deal with every day. This work discusses nonlinear phenomena in random environments, with a view to their implementation in real devices and applications. In addition, it gives greater exposure to younger, promising researchers who seldom are able to speak at international meetings, while also providing several review talks by established individuals. The book emphasizes applications of nonlinear dynamical systems theory in fields as diverse as neuroscience and biomedical engineering, fluids, chaos control, nonlinear signal/image processing, stochastic resonance, devices, and nonlinear dynamics in socioeconomic systems. In particular, presentations were chosen which described methods being actively implemented to solve real problems.

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Chaos in Dynamic Systems
G. Zaslavsky
Manufacturer: Routledge
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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Nonlinear Dynamics in Circuits

Manufacturer: World Scientific Publishing Company
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 9810224389

Book Description

Book Description

This book is a complete treatise on the theory of nonlinear dynamics of chaotic and stochastic systems. It contains both an exhaustive introduction to the subject as well as a detailed discussion of fundamental problems and research results in a field to which the authors have made important contributions themselves. Despite the unified presentation of the subject, care has been taken to present the material in largely self-contained chapters.The present book can thus be used either as a textbook by graduate students or as a modern monograph by researchers in this field.

Stochastic Dynamics and Control, Volume 4 (Monograph Series on Nonlinear Science and Complexity)

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Stochastic Dynamics and Control, Volume 4 (Monograph Series on Nonlinear Science and Complexity)
Jian-Qiao Sun
Manufacturer: Elsevier Science
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0444522301

Book Description

This book is a result of many years of authors research and teaching on random vibration and control. It was used as lecture notes for a graduate course. It provides a systematic review of theory of probability, stochastic processes, and stochastic calculus. The feedback control is also reviewed in the book. Random vibration analyses of SDOF, MDOF and continuous structural systems are presented in a pedagogical order. The application of the random vibration theory to reliability and fatigue analysis is also discussed. Recent research results on fatigue analysis of non-Gaussian stress processes are also presented. Classical feedback control, active damping, covariance control, optimal control, sliding control of stochastic systems, feedback control of stochastic time-delayed systems, and probability density tracking control are studied. Many control results are new in the literature and included in this book for the first time. The book serves as a reference to the engineers who design and maintain structures subject to harsh random excitations including earthquakes, sea waves, wind gusts, and aerodynamic forces, and would like to reduce the damages of structural systems due to random excitations.

· Comprehensive review of probability theory, and stochastic processes
· Random vibrations
· Structural reliability and fatigue, Non-Gaussian fatigue
· Monte Carlo methods
· Stochastic calculus and engineering applications
· Stochastic feedback controls and optimal controls
· Stochastic sliding mode controls
· Feedback control of stochastic time-delayed systems
· Probability density tracking control

Advances in Nonlinear Dynamics and Stochastic Processes II

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Advances in Nonlinear Dynamics and Stochastic Processes II

Manufacturer: World Scientific Pub Co
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: 9971500205

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Advances in Nonlinear Dynamics and Stochastic Processes II
Italy) Meeting on Nonlinear Dynamics (1986 Rome , and G. Paladin
Manufacturer: World Scientific Pub Co Inc
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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Flying on Waxwings Too Close to the Sun?

Meandering and Literary, but engaging

A pleasant weekend read? Yes. High lit? Nope.

A Dreary Seattle Novel

Rich and interesting - to anyone else?

Waxwings: A novel
Jonathan Raban
Manufacturer: Pantheon
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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Hunting Mister Heartbreak: A Discovery of America

My Holy War: Dispatches from the Home Front

Coasting: A Private Voyage

Old Glory : A Voyage Down the Mississippi

Surveillance: A Novel

ASIN: 0375410082
Release Date: 2003-09-30

Amazon.com

Jonathan Raban's Waxwings is a canticle for the late 1990s told through the intertwined lives of several Seattlites. In the novel, the city becomes a microcosm of America at the turn of the millennium, and Raban's characters--all in some way tragic "tourists" in the world--are rendered with a compassion that redeems their personal failings.

Thomas Janeway is a British novelist and professor of literature at the University of Washington whose life is coming apart in his adopted home. He deeply loves his four-year-old son, Finn, but his wife, Beth, is caught up in the dot-com explosion, and the couple has grown apart. As Seattle erupts in the WTO riots and terrorist plots, Janeway's life crumbles around him. His wife leaves him, his house becomes a shambles of half-completed reconstruction, and his son is caught fighting in school. When he becomes a "person of interest" in the abduction and possible murder of a local girl, he is put on leave with pay from the university. Yet, Raban does not let Janeway--or any of his characters--wallow in self-pity. They all try to move forward with life, and even Janeway "the suspect" finds sympathetic allies in surprising places.

At one point in the novel, Janeway lectures his students on the "generosity" of V.S. Pritchett, saying that the writer believed "in a general redistribution of verbal wealth, in taking good lines from the haves, and giving them to the have-nots." This "liberal realism" also characterizes Raban's work. Raban treats all of his characters, from Janeway to Finn, with patience and balance. He fully inhabits each and tells fragments of the story from the perspective of Beth, Tom, Finn, and even Tom's illegal-immigrant contractor, Chick. One narrative infuses another, lending the novel a Dickensian universality. Together the disparate voices perfectly capture the particulars of a place, Seattle, at a unique moment in American history. --Patrick O'Kelley

Book Description

From the best-selling author of Passage to Juneau—“Raban at his best,” wrote Ian McEwan—an unsettling, tender, and always surprising novel set in Seattle at the turn of the millennium, when the high-tech Gold Rush threatens to overwhelm the actual world with its myriad virtual alternatives.

Two immigrants, though, are drawn here by more traditional versions of the American Dream. For Tom Janeway—a Hungarian-born Englishman—it is the wife and son he thought he’d never have. For an illegal alien—Chick, as he comes to call himself—it is the land of opportunity he’d imagined back in Fujian province. Given the overheated service economy, mutual need introduces the writer–professor–NPR-commentator to this enterprising handyman, and each soon finds himself strangely dependent on the other. Because meanwhile, all around them, people are busily charting futures that are obscure to, or exclude, anyone else.

Waxwings masterfully depicts the social realities of a boomtown in flux, as well as the illusions that distract its inhabitants from the most basic human impulse: to create a place we can call home. This is what Chick dreams of achieving, and what Tom must suddenly struggle to preserve. As the NASDAQ index spirals upward, street riots break out, a terrorist is arrested, a child disappears, a jetliner goes down—and the city, rimmed with feral countryside, begins to emerge in its true colors.

The Washington Post proclaimed of Foreign Land that “Jonathan Raban’s achievements in this novel are nothing short of awesome,” and with Waxwings—exquisitely written and hugely entertaining—he demonstrates more powerfully than ever before that he “invests his characters with such freshness and warmth, writes prose of such Wordsworth-like beauty, and does it all with such effortless mastery that he takes the reader’s breath away.”

Customer Reviews:

Flying on Waxwings Too Close to the Sun?.......2007-01-11

Great fiction writers make stuff up. And they concoct a fictive world in which this made-up stuff seamlessly combines and blends with "real" stuff they also bring to their books: Seattle demography, for example, or dotcom economics or marine navigation or ornithology or the decomposition of house timbers in damp climates.

Non-fiction writers (for the most part) leave out all the made-up parts.

And in between you get some very good writers who just aren't great fiction writers. They just can't do the blending. Jonathan Raban's Waxwings shows him to be one of this species.

The book is peopled well. Waxwings has true, powerfully-realized characters (except for perhaps the most off-key Chinese immigrant you'll ever hear, though you'll root for him). The book's plot is also for the most part well-constructed. And the writing itself is always fine, sometimes very fine indeed.

But somehow it clunks as a novel. And for me, that clunking sound comes whenever Raban reels out a set of his non-fiction Real Facts and crams them in alongside his fiction. So here come some Real Facts about how a ship is navigated into harbor, here are some Real Facts about the dotcom boom and bust, even some final Real Facts about the feeding habits of waxwings (Um, apparently they're birds. Well, I didn't know.)

I like his writing and I like his characters. I'm just not sure Jonathan Raban is a real fiction writer. He knows how to make stuff up but (at least on the strength of Waxwings) he doesn't know how to hide the facts.

Meandering and Literary, but engaging.......2005-01-10

I don't usually go for the 'literary' type novels, caring more for story than for prose, but I decided to give this a go anyway. Having chosen it at random, I had no previous expectations, and was pleasantly surprised to find it well-set in one of my favorite cities. Tom, the protagonist, is richly drawn and sympathetic. His wife Beth, less well drawn, seems to be there mostly to provide Tom with conflict.
The story wanders through the first half of the book, and the plot goes here or there without any guide map. Is it about Tom's relationship with the Chinese roofer? Is it about his relationship issues? Is it about the fateful walk he takes? The reviewers didn't seem to know either, and I don't blame him. At the end of the book, I didn't know what it was about, and couldn't easily explain what had happened.
Does it matter? No. Tom felt real to me, and Raban didn't let his beautiful prose get in the way of the story. After a hundred pages, I knew I wanted to read it to the end, and at the end, I felt happy with the ride. What else do we expect from a novel?

A pleasant weekend read? Yes. High lit? Nope........2005-01-03

Like a few other reviewers on this site, I was drawn in by the fact that Waxwings takes place in my hometown. Raban is on a bit of a roll. Waxwings has sold well, and even appeared briefly on stage here at the Book-It Repertory Theatre.

Waxwings kept me engaged for four evenings of reading. It's fast, enjoyable, and I kept turning the pages to see how the lives of Tom, Beth, Chick and the rest were coming along. It's interesting, pleasant, and kept me largely away from the TV set. For that it gets 3 stars.

Where the book falls down is as anything other than a pleasant light read. Tom is the only character in the book with any depth to speak of. Everyone else seems two-dimensional. Likewise, late-90s Seattle, which seems to be Raban's overarching focus, is hit with too much unnecessary detail, and too little to fill in the lay of the land to anyone who isn't intimately familiar with our fair burg. Where is Queen Anne? Who lives there? Is Torrefazzione a beloved former haunt of Raban's, or just a Starbucks with a funny Italian name? Even the University of Washington, where Raban spends a fair amount of the novels time and no small quantity of barbs seems barely fleshed out.

James Joyce said famously that if Dublin burned down, the city could be reconstructed from his books. In Waxwings, only Tom Janeway's rotting Victorian snaps into focus. The rest seems fuzzy and undefined.

A Dreary Seattle Novel.......2004-11-22

"Waxwings" was on the best seller lists for months, it was set in Seattle, and it got rave reviews, especially in the papers here. While I read all kinds of books, I admit it's always fun to read about the city I live in, so I gave this one a try. It WAS fun to read about the city I live in. But "Waxwings" certainly did not live up to its reviews or my expectations. Folks, it does not rain all the time here! Every city our size on the East Coast gets more rain than we do--look it up in your almanac. And pines are not the native evergreens here--those are native to Eastern Washington. Our dominant native evergreen is the douglas fir. But my real objection was not that Raban didn't get the local details right, even though most of the others were correct. It was that his characters, with one exception, were either boring or unbelievable. And the plot didn't go anywhere interesting.

Tom was only interesting in the classroom, and then he was functioning on automatic pilot, doing something he had done a million times. He was a failed writer. The only thing he had ever succeeded at was marrying Beth and fathering Finn. Clearly he is not real to her, or to his mother back in England, since he lies to his mother. His head is in his books, not in the here and now. Sometimes this can be an adorable feature in a character. In Tom, it is an escape from a world he cannot face. His deep love for his son is his only redeeming and interesting feature. He is not a fully realized character.

Beth isn't interested in Tom, and apparently hasn't been for some time. Her work, which she doesn't understand, is all that interests her. Does she talk to Tom about their relationship, in a Seattle when the only thing of more interest than tech was relationships? No. She just ups and leaves. Not for another man, just for her job and an apartment full of light and boxes full of Ikea furniture. At least she has a motive--she's never had a place to live before that she herself picked out. But she too is deeply devoted to Finn, which is her only redeeming and interesting feature. She is not a fully realized character.

Finn, now, is a very redeeming and interesting character. He longs for connection, with his parents, with anyone, with his "friend" Spencer at Treetops preeschool--which has descended into a basement without losing its cachet. He even fights Spencer, who repeats something he doesn't understand his parents saying at home, to prove his loyalty to his father. He immediately loves the obnoxious and ugly puppy that Chick so cynically buys him. Finn, at four and three-quarters, is a wonderful and fully realized character, and funny to boot.

Which brings us to Chick, the other major character. The most interesting part of the plot was his escape from the container and the ship which unwittingly brought him from China. It was fascinating to see America through the eyes of someone who had only Chinese perceptions and only the barest of English words to guide him as he tried to find his way. He was obviously smart, and knew to head for Chinatown where he could blend in with others who looked like him and didn't know English. Unfortunately for him, he ended up not in Chinatown (where things might have been just as bad), but in a shipyard where an ugly American ran a crew of illegal Mexicans taking asbestos out of the hold of an old ship. This scene alone is worth the price of checking the book out of the library, something out of Dante's "Inferno," as the reader knows things Chick, still called Chink, does not. The boss notices Chick working hard, and they end up forging a precarious relationship. Chick notices the manipulative way the boss now cajoles, now threatens, to get his crew to work. He decides to steal the crew, to make money himself, and treats them the same way. Whoever he was before he came to America, he has transformed himself into the worst kind of American entrepreneur. He was a partially realized but repellent character, an uncomfortable mirror to the American dream.

When he shows up in Tom's life, we are led by the book jacket to believe some important relationship will develop. But it never does. Chick picks him for an easy mark, because Tom's old house needs repair. Tom proves he's right, and then Chick moves on to other easy marks, after surreptitiously living in Tom's basement for a time. When Chick shows up with the puppy, Tom's naivete leads him to believe that the three of them--Tom, Finn, and Chick--now constitute some kind of "chosen" family. But the reader knows that Chick will be off again, until he can find another excuse to do something to Tom's house.

I found the book to be a real downer. Why did I finish it? Because it was about my home town, and because I kept looking for something redeeming about it. But I never found it. The waxwing image doesn't cut it, if only because Raban has apparently never seen them in rows on the telephone wire, passing berries along the line and sharing. That doesn't seem to be the point he got from these admittedly lovely and elusive birds.

I read in some of the reviews that this is the first of four in a series. I think I'll pass on the others.

Rich and interesting - to anyone else?.......2004-05-30

I just finished Waxwings - the wrong time to write a review, but I'll do it anyway.

This was the first of Raban's novels I've read, and while I didn't enjoy it quite as much as Richard Russo's Empire Falls, it was a white-collar version of Russo's blue-collar ethos; sympathetic (if not quite as deep and subtlely drawn) characters (with a great portrayal of a child and his interaction with his parents), interesting interwoven stories which were consistent enough to not have offputting surprises two-thirds of the way through, and a great tone carrying through. I found myself thinking about both the book and the characters in the car, wanted to finish it every night, etc. Definitely a keeper.

I'm a Seattleite, so while I appreciated all of the shout-outs to my neighborhood and the environs, I don't know if it would seem either provincial or overly foreign to a non-local. I don't think of Seattle as sufficiently strange to merit the depth of description and the concept of a "Seattle novelist," but perhaps I'm too used to the rain.

The last page or so was wooden. It had a typical novelist's opening or closing lyrical tendency that felt dramatically out of place.

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Waxwings: A Novel
Jonathan Raban
Manufacturer: RB Large Print
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000NNDA24

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