The study of phase transitions is among the most fascinating fields in physics. Originally limited to transition phenomena in equilibrium systems, this field has outgrown its classical confines during the last two decades. The behavior of far from equilibrium systems has received more and more attention and has been an extremely active and productive subject of research for physicists, chemists and biologists. Their studies have brought about a more unified vision of the laws which govern self-organization processes of physico-chemical and biological sys tems. A major achievement has been the extension of the notion of phase transi tion to instabilities which occur only in open nonlinear systems. The notion of phase transition has been proven fruitful in apphcation to nonequilibrium ins- bihties known for about eight decades, like certain hydrodynamic instabilities, as well as in the case of the more recently discovered instabilities in quantum optical systems such as the laser, in chemical systems such as the Belousov-Zhabotinskii reaction and in biological systems. Even outside the realm of natural sciences, this notion is now used in economics and sociology. In this monograph we show that the notion of phase transition can be extend ed even further. It apphes also to a new class of transition phenomena which occur only in nonequilibrium systems subjected to a randomly fluctuating en vironment.

Randomness is ubiquitous in nature. Random drivers are generally considered a source of disorder in environmental systems. However, the interaction between noise and nonlinear dynamics may lead to the emergence of a number of ordered behaviors (in time and space) that would not exist in the absence of noise. This counterintuitive effect of randomness may play a crucial role in environmental processes. For example, seemingly 'random' background events in the atmosphere can grow into larger instabilities that have great effects on weather patterns. This book presents the basics of the theory of stochastic calculus and its application to the study of noise-induced phenomena in environmental systems. It will be an invaluable reference text for ecologists, geoscientists and environmental engineers interested in the study of stochastic environmental dynamics.

Stephen Hawking says that the 21st century will be the century of complexity and indeed now systems biology or medicine means dealing with complexity. Both the genome and physiome have emerged in studying complex physiological systems. Computational and mathematical modeling has been regarded as an efficient tool to boost the understanding about living systems in normal or pathophysiological states. Covering applied methodology, basic case studies and complex applications, this volume provides researchers with an overview of modeling and computational studies of physiology (i.e. quantitative physiology), which is becoming an increasingly important branch of systems biology. This book aims to build multi-scale models to investigate functions in living systems and explain how biomolecules, cells, organs, organ systems and organisms carry out the chemical or physical functions. Some of the models addressed are related to gene expression, calcium signalling, neural activity, blood dynamics and bone mechanics. Combining theory and practice, with extensive use of MATLAB, this book is designed to establish a paradigm for quantitative physiology by integrating biology, mathematics, physics and informatics etc. To benefit from this book, the readers are expected to have a background in general physiology and mathematics

Vol. 1.

Stochastic Differential Equations have become increasingly important in modelling complex systems in physics, chemistry, biology, climatology and other fields. This book examines and provides systems for practitioners to use, and provides a number of case studies to show how they can work in practice.

The theory of stochastic processes originally grew out of efforts to describe Brownian motion quantitatively. Today it provides a huge arsenal of methods suitable for analyzing the influence of noise on a wide range of systems. The credit for acquiring all the deep insights and powerful methods is due ma- ly to a handful of physicists and mathematicians: Einstein, Smoluchowski, Langevin, Wiener, Stratonovich, etc. Hence it is no surprise that until - cently the bulk of basic and applied stochastic research was devoted to purely mathematical and physical questions. However, in the last decade we have witnessed an enormous growth of results achieved in other sciences - especially chemistry and biology - based on applying methods of stochastic processes. One reason for this stochastics boom may be that the realization that noise plays a constructive rather than the expected deteriorating role has spread to communities beyond physics. Besides their aesthetic appeal these noise-induced, noise-supported or noise-enhanced effects sometimes offer an explanation for so far open pr- lems (information transmission in the nervous system and information p- cessing in the brain, processes at the cell level, enzymatic reactions, etc.). They may also pave the way to novel technological applications (noise-- hanced reaction rates, noise-induced transport and separation on the na- scale, etc.). Key words to be mentioned in this context are stochastic r- onance, Brownian motors or ratchets, and noise-supported phenomena in excitable systems.

This book collects recent results in systems whose evolutions are dominated by fluctuations, driven systems in which the way to dissipate driving forces is relevant, and systems in which disorder induces highly non-trivial dynamics leading naturally to questions of computational complexity. Topics of the 14 papers include multiplicative noise in non-equilibrium phase transitions, the stochastic population dynamics of spiking neurons, anomalous velocity distributions in elastic Maxwell gases, universality issues in surface kinetic roughening of thin solid films, and multi-state neural networks based upon spin glasses. Some of the chapters have appeared in the arXiv.org database. No information is given about the authors. Annotation : 2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com).

The results of an International Conference on [title] held in Brussels, Belgium, Aug./Sept. 1987, these papers deal with self-organization and nonlinear dynamics in chemistry, giving the results of recent experiments and bringing new emphasis on spatial inhomogeneities and dynamical phenomena in con"

The volume that you have before you is the result of a growing realization that fluctuations in nonequilibrium systems playa much more important role than was 1 first believed. It has become clear that in nonequilibrium systems noise plays an active, one might even say a creative, role in processes involving self-organization, pattern formation, and coherence, as well as in biological information processing, energy transduction, and functionality. Now is not the time for a comprehensive summary of these new ideas, and I am certainly not the person to attempt such a thing. Rather, this short introductory essay (and the book as a whole) is an attempt to describe where we are at present and how the viewpoint that has evolved in the last decade or so differs from those of past decades. Fluctuations arise either because of the coupling of a particular system to an ex ternal unknown or "unknowable" system or because the particular description we are using is only a coarse-grained description which on some level is an approxima tion. We describe the unpredictable and random deviations from our deterministic equations of motion as noise or fluctuations. A nonequilibrium system is one in which there is a net flow of energy. There are, as I see it, four basic levels of sophistication, or paradigms, con cerning fluctuations in nature. At the lowest level of sophistication, there is an implicit assumption that noise is negligible: the deterministic paradigm.

An international conference. titled Nonlinear Phenomena in Chemical Dynamics was held in Bordeaux on September 7-11, 1981. The present volume contains the text of lectures and abstracts of posters presented during the meeting. This conference is part of a series of scientific multidisciplinary meetings in which chemistry is involved at various levels. Amongst the most recent ones let us mention Aachen 1979, Bielefeld 1979, New York 1979, Elmau 1981. In addition, this meeting is a direct extension of the first one that took place in Bordeaux in 1978 on the topic "Far from equilibrium: instabilities and structures," at the conclusions of which we could write (cf. Far fram Equilibrium, Springer Series in Synergetics, Vol. 3): "The three key words, far fram equilibriUm, instabilities and structuPes, best illustrate the new concepts which emerge from the description of the dynamics of various systems relevant to many different research areas. " The present proceedings show how much these remarks have remained true, even though substantial progress has been achieved during the three last years. To get a ,deeper experimental knowledge of open reacting systems, to model and simulate reaction-diffusion systems, to develop the mathematical theory of dynamical sys tems, these are the main direction~ in current investigations.