When things grow many : complexity, universality and emergence in nature / Lawrence Schulman

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Schulman, Lawrence, author.

Series:

Oxford Academic

Oxford scholarship online

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Statistical mechanics.

Science--Statistical methods.

Science.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (305 pages)

Place of Publication:

Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2022

Summary:

Methods of statistical mechanics are applied to many natural phenomena in the limit of large numbers of constituents. Applications include linguistics, finance, urban segregation, firefly and cardiac synchrony, Supreme Court voting, ecology, flocking, epidemics, crowd control, genetics, neurology, and so on. There is even a bit of physics (luminescence, large-scale structure, morphology). Suitable for use by advanced undergraduates (in any field) and graduate students. Some mathematical background is required although there are explanations of more advanced topics (e.g. fractals).

Contents:

1 Introduction

2 Ideal gas

3 Rubber bands

4 Percolitis

5 Ferromagnetism

6 Maximum entropy methods

7 Power laws

8 Universality, renormalization and critical phenomena

9 Social sciences

10 Biological sciences

11 Physical sciences

12 Putting it all together

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Other Format:

Print version: Schulman, Lawrence When Things Grow Many

ISBN:

0-19-189473-7

0-19-260645-X

OCLC:

1291317282