Chaotic Evolution and Strange Attractors

Lezioni Lincee

by David Ruelle

This book, based on lectures given at the Accademia dei Lincei, is an accessible and leisurely account of systems that display a chaotic time evolution. This behaviour, though deterministic, has features more characteristic of stochastic systems. The analysis here is based on a statistical technique known as time series analysis and so avoids complex mathematics, yet provides a good understanding of the fundamentals. Professor Ruelle is one of the world's authorities on chaos and dynamical systems and his account here will be welcomed by scientists in physics, engineering, biology, chemistry and economics who encounter nonlinear systems in their research.

Genres: Mathematics

112 pages, Paperback

First published September 7, 1989

About the author

David Pierre Ruelle is a Belgian mathematical physicist, naturalized French. He has worked on statistical physics and dynamical systems. With Floris Takens, Ruelle coined the term strange attractor, and developed a new theory of turbulence.

Reviews

[Marco Bitetto · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an excellently written book that has plenty of "meat"
in it for the mathematically sophisticated. It presents the
theory of strange attracts as was first discovered by Edward
Lorenz. However, for those without the mathematical
sophistication, I would recommend a less mathematical treat-
ment of the subject...