Andrzej K. Nowak - In Sync: The Emergence of Function in Minds, Groups and Societies

Springer Complexity

Springer Complexity is an interdisciplinary program publishing the best research and academic-level teaching on both fundamental and applied aspects of complex systemscutting across all traditional disciplines of the natural and life sciences, engineering, economics, medicine, neuroscience, social and computer science.

Complex Systems are systems that comprise many interacting parts with the ability to generate a new quality of macroscopic collective behavior the manifestations of which are the spontaneous formation of distinctive temporal, spatial or functional structures. Models of such systems can be successfully mapped onto quite diverse real-life situations like the climate, the coherent emission of light from lasers, chemical reaction-diffusion systems, biological cellular networks, the dynamics of stock markets and of the Internet, earthquake statistics and prediction, freeway traffic, the human brain, or the formation of opinions in social systems, to name just some of the popular applications.

Although their scope and methodologies overlap somewhat, one can distinguish the following main concepts and tools: self-organization, nonlinear dynamics, synergetics, turbulence, dynamical systems, catastrophes, instabilities, stochastic processes, chaos, graphs and networks, cellular automata, adaptive systems, genetic algorithms and computational intelligence.

The three major book publication platforms of the Springer Complexity program are the monograph series Understanding Complex Systems focusing on the various applications of complexity, the Springer Series in Synergetics, which is devoted to the quantitative theoretical and methodological foundations, and the Springer Briefs in Complexity which are concise and topical working reports, case studies, surveys, essays and lecture notes of relevance to the field. In addition to the books in these two core series, the program also incorporates individual titles ranging from textbooks to major reference works.

Founding Editor: S. Kelso

Future scientific and technological developments in many fields will necessarily depend upon coming to grips with complex systems. Such systems are complex in both their compositiontypically many different kinds of components interacting simultaneously and nonlinearly with each other and their environments on multiple levelsand in the rich diversity of behavior of which they are capable.

The Springer Series in Understanding Complex Systems series (UCS) promotes new strategies and paradigms for understanding and realizing applications of complex systems research in a wide variety of fields and endeavors. UCS is explicitly transdisciplinary. It has three main goals: First, to elaborate the concepts, methods and tools of complex systems at all levels of description and in all scientific fields, especially newly emerging areas within the life, social, behavioral, economic, neuro- and cognitive sciences (and derivatives thereof); second, to encourage novel applications of these ideas in various fields of engineering and computation such as robotics, nano-technology and informatics; third, to provide a single forum within which commonalities and differences in the workings of complex systems may be discerned, hence leading to deeper insight and understanding.

UCS will publish monographs, lecture notes and selected edited contributions aimed at communicating new findings to a large multidisciplinary audience.

More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/5394