You may have to register before you can download all our books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
This book is the second volume in a new series on 'Great Minds in Regional Science,' which seeks to present a contemporary view on the scientific relevance of the work done by great thinkers in regional science. This volume presents, among others, Adam Smith, Johann Heinrich von Thünen, and Alan Wilson. Each chapter combines factual biographical information about the ‘Great Mind,’ a description of their major contributions, and a discussion of the broader context of their work, as well as an assessment of its current relevance, scientific recognition, and policy impact. The book attempts to fill a gap in our knowledge and to respond to the growing interest in the formation and development of the field of regional science and its key influential figures.
This book focuses on the emerging field of evolutionary economic policy, highlighting the interface between the state, markets, and the evolutionary complexity of modern economies. The contributors explore the possibilities and limitations of governance, and provide a unique platform for the advancement of modern evolutionary economic theory.
This book systematically provides a prospective integrated approach for complexity social science in its view of statistical physics and mathematics, with an impressive collection of the knowledge and expertise of leading researchers from all over the world. The book mainly covers both finitary methods of statistical equilibrium and data-driven analysis by econophysics. The late Professor Masanao Aoki of UCLA, who passed away at the end of July 2018, in his later years dedicated himself to the reconstruction of macroeconomics mainly in terms of statistical physics. Professor Aoki, who was already an IEEE fellow, was also named an Econometric Society Fellow in 1979. Until the early 1990s, how...
The book Modeling Reality covers a wide range of fascinating subjects, accessible to anyone who wants to learn about the use of computer modeling to solve a diverse range of problems, but who does not possess a specialized training in mathematics or computer science. The material presented is pitched at the level of high-school graduates, even though it covers some advanced topics (cellular automata, Shannon's measure of information, deterministic chaos, fractals, game theory, neural networks, genetic algorithms, and Turing machines). These advanced topics are explained in terms of well known simple concepts: Cellular automata - Game of Life, Shannon's formula - Game of twenty questions, Game theory - Television quiz, etc. The book is unique in explaining in a straightforward, yet complete, fashion many important ideas, related to various models of reality and their applications.
"Digital transformation" sounds harmless, given that the explosion in data volumes, processing power and Artificial Intelligence has driven humanity and the entire world to a point of no return. We will surely see a new civilization, but we are at a crossroads. The future needs to be re-invented, decisions must be taken. After the automation of factories and the creation of self-driving cars, the automation of society is on its way. But there are two kinds of automation: a centralized top-down control of the world and a distributed control approach, supporting local self-organization. Using the power of today’s information systems, governments and big tech companies seem to engage in the f...
"Are there common phenomena and laws in the dynamic behavior of granular materials, traffic, and socio-economic systems?" The answers given at the international workshop "Traffic and Granular Flow '99" are presented in this volume. From a physical standpoint, all these systems can be treated as (self)-driven many-particle systems with strong fluctuations, showing multistability, phase transitions, non-linear waves, etc. The great interest in these systems is due to several unexpected new discoveries and their practical relevance for solving some fundamental problems of today's societies. This includes intelligent measures for traffic flow optimization and methods from "econophysics" for stabilizing (stock) markets.
As the real world is rapidly becoming more and more complicated, economists need to venture beyond the boundaries of mainstream economics and integrate philosophical thought and complexity into their analytical frameworks. In this context, this volume brings together papers on economic theory and its related issues, exploring complex production systems and heterogeneously interacting human behavior. The author challenges economists to integrate economic theory and moral science anew by referring to evolutionary economics and socio-econophysics. The three parts of the book focus on the complexities of production and social interaction, the moral science of heterogeneous economic interaction, and the Avatamsaka’s dilemma of the two-person game with only positive spillovers.
Written by some of the founders of complexity theory and complexity theories of cities (CTC), this Handbook expertly guides the reader through over forty years of intertwined developments: the emergence of general theories of complex self-organized systems and the consequent emergence of CTC.
Hermann Haken (born 1927) is one of the “fathers” of the quantum-mechanical laser theory, formulated between 1962 and 1966, in strong competition with American researchers. Later on, he created Synergetics, the science of cooperation in multicomponent systems. The book concentrates on the development of his scientific work during the first thirty-five years of his career. In 1970 he and his doctoral student Robert Graham were able to show that the laser is an example of a nonlinear system far from thermal equilibrium that shows a phase-transition like behavior. Subsequently, this insight opened the way for the formulation of Synergetics. Synergetics is able to explain, how very large sys...
Today, our cities are an embodiment of the complex, historical evolution of knowledge, desires and technology. Our planned and designed activities co-evolve with our aspirations, mediated by the existing technologies and social structures. The city represents the accretion and accumulation of successive layers of collective activity, structuring and being structured by other, increasingly distant cities, reaching now right around the globe. This historical and structural development cannot therefore be understood or captured by any set of fixed quantitative relations. Structural changes imply that the patterns of growth, and their underlying reasons change over time, and therefore that any attempt to control the morphology of cities and their patterns of flow by means of planning and design, must be dynamical, based on the mechanisms that drive the changes occurring at a given moment. This carefully edited post-proceedings volume gathers a snapshot view by leading researchers in field, of current complexity theories of cities. In it, the achievements, criticisms and potentials yet to be realized are reviewed and the implications to planning and urban design are assessed.