This book is the ultimate assembly of recent research activities on molecular architectonics and nanoarchitectonics by authors who are worldwide experts. The book proposes new ways of creating functional materials at the nano level using the concepts of molecular architectonics and nanoarchitectonics, which are expected to be the next-generation approaches beyond conventional nanotechnology. All the contents are categorized by types of materials, organic materials, biomaterials, and nanomaterials. For that reason, non-specialists including graduate and undergraduate students can start reading the book from any points they would like. Cutting-edge trends in nanotechnology and material sciences are easily visible in the contents of the book, which is highly useful for both students and experimental materials scientists.

This textbook is designed for a one year course covering the fundamentals of partial differential equations, geared towards advanced undergraduates and beginning graduate students in mathematics, science, engineering, and elsewhere. The exposition carefully balances solution techniques, mathematical rigor, and significant applications, all illustrated by numerous examples. Extensive exercise sets appear at the end of almost every subsection, and include straightforward computational problems to develop and reinforce new techniques and results, details on theoretical developments and proofs, challenging projects both computational and conceptual, and supplementary material that motivates the student to delve further into the subject.

Random matrices are widely and successfully used in physics for almost 60-70 years, beginning with the works of Dyson and Wigner. Although it is an old subject, it is constantly developing into new areas of physics and mathematics. It constitutes now a part of the general culture of a theoretical physicist. Mathematical methods inspired by random matrix theory become more powerful, sophisticated and enjoy rapidly growing applications in physics. Recent examples include the calculation of universal correlations in the mesoscopic system, new applications in disordered and quantum chaotic systems, in combinatorial and growth models, as well as the recent breakthrough, due to the matrix models, in two dimensional gravity and string theory and the non-abelian gauge theories. The book consists of the lectures of the leading specialists and covers rather systematically many of these topics. It can be useful to the specialists in various subjects using random matrices, from PhD students to confirmed scientists.

This book is especially addressed to young researchers in theoretical physics with a basic background in Field Theory and Condensed Matter Physics. The topics were chosen so as to offer the largest possible overlap between the two expertises, selecting a few key problems in Condensed Matter Theory which have been recently revisited within a field-theoretic approach. The presentation of the material is aimed not only at providing the reader with an overview of this exciting frontier area of modern theoretical physics, but also at elucidating most of the tools needed for a technical comprehen­ sion of the many papers appearing in current issues of physics journals and, hopefully, to enable the reader to tackle research problems in this area of physics. This makes the material a live creature: while not pretending it to be exhaustive, it is tutorial enough to be useful to young researchers as a starting point in anyone of the topics covered in the book.

Dynamic Neural Field Theory for Motion Perception provides a new theoretical framework that permits a systematic analysis of the dynamic properties of motion perception.
This framework uses dynamic neural fields as a key mathematical concept. The author demonstrates how neural fields can be applied for the analysis of perceptual phenomena and its underlying neural processes. Also, similar principles form a basis for the design of computer vision systems as well as the design of artificially behaving systems. The book discusses in detail the application of this theoretical approach to motion perception and will be of great interest to researchers in vision science, psychophysics, and biological visual systems.

We are often told that quantum phenomena demand radical revisions of our scientific world view and that no physical theory describing well defined objects, such as particles described by their positions, evolving in a well defined way, let alone deterministically, can account for such phenomena. The great majority of physicists continue to subscribe to this view, despite the fact that just such a deterministic theory, accounting for all of the phe­ nomena of nonrelativistic quantum mechanics, was proposed by David Bohm more than four decades ago and has arguably been around almost since the inception of quantum mechanics itself. Our purpose in asking colleagues to write the essays for this volume has not been to produce a Festschrift in honor of David Bohm (worthy an undertaking as that would have been) or to gather together a collection of papers simply stating uncritically Bohm's views on quantum mechanics. The central theme around which the essays in this volume are arranged is David Bohm's version of quantum mechanics. It has by now become fairly standard practice to refer to his theory as Bohmian mechanics and to the larger conceptual framework within which this is located as the causal quantum theory program.

Particles with fractional statistics interpolating between bosons and fermions have attracted considerable interest from mathematical physicists. In recent years it has emerged that these so-called anyons have rather unexpected applications, such as the fractional Hall effect, anyonic excitations in films of liquid helium, and high-temrperature superconductivity. Furthermore, they are discussed also in the context of conformal field theories. This book is a systematic and pedagogical introduction that considers the subject of anyons from many different points of view. In particular, the author presents the relation of anyons to braid groups and Chern-Simons field theory and devotes three chapters to physical applications. The book, while being of interest to researchers, primarily addresses advanced students of mathematics and physics.

A dominant feature of our ordinary experience of the world is a sense of irreversible change: things lose form, people grow old, energy dissipates. On the other hand, a major conceptual scheme we use to describe the natural world, molecular dynamics, has reversibility at its core. The need to harmonize conceptual schemes and experience leads to several questions, one of which is the focus of this book. How does irreversibility at the macroscopic level emerge from the reversibility that prevails at the molecular level? Attempts to explain the emergence have emphasized probability, and assigned different probabilities to the forward and reversed directions of processes so that one direction is far more probable than the other. The conclu­ sion is promising, but the reasons for it have been obscure. In many cases the aim has been to find an explana­ tion in the nature of probability itself. Reactions to that have been divided: some think the aim is justified while others think it is absurd.

This book explores the role of fractional calculus and associated partial differential equations in modeling multiscale phenomena and overlapping macroscopic & microscopic scales, offering an innovative and powerful tool for modeling complex systems. While integer order PDEs have a long-standing history, the novel setting of fractional PDEs opens up new possibilities for the simulation of multi-physics phenomena. The book examines a range of releavant examples that showcase the seamless transition from wave propagation to diffusion or from local to non-local dynamics in both continuum and discrete systems. These systems have been argued as being particularly relevant in contexts such as nonlinear optics, lattice nonlinear dynamical systems, and dispersive nonlinear wave phenomena, where the exploration of the potential fractionality has emerged as a highly active topic for current studies.

The first edition of this book has found great interest among scientists and en­ gineers dealing with pattern recognition and among psychologists working on psychophysics or Gestalt psychology. This book also proved highly useful for graduate students of informatics. The concept of the synergetic computer offers an important alternative to the by now more traditional neural nets. I just mention a few advantages: There are no ghost states so that time-consuming methods such as simulated annealing can be avoided; the synaptic strengths are explicitly determined by the prototype patterns to be stored, but they can equally well be learned, and the learning procedure allows a classification. Also a precise meaning and function can be attributed to "hidden variables".

In the 1970's and 1980's, we saw phenomenal advancement in nonlinear sci­ ence, which had led to many important discoveries that greatly improve our understanding of the physical world. Among them, the discovery of chaos in deterministic systems is unarguably one of the most revolutionary scientific findings. We are now able to explain the apparent complexity and subtle or­ der exhibited by many physical systems under the unified framework of chaos theory. The past decade has seen heightened interest in the exploitation of chaos for useful applications in engineering systems. One application area that has attracted a great deal of attention is communications. Chaotic signals, by virtue of their wide band characteristic, are natural candidates for carrying information in a spread-spectrum communication environment.

The 2nd edition of this book provides novel topics and studyies in boundaries of networks and Big Data Systems.The central theme of this book is the extent to which the structure of the free dynamical boundaries of a system controls the evolution of the system as a whole. Applying three orthogonal types of thinking - mathematical, constructivist and morphological, it illustrates these concepts using applications to selected problems from the social and life sciences, as well as economics.
In a broader context, it introduces and reviews some modern mathematical approaches to the science of complex systems.

This book results from recent studies aimed at answering questions raised by astrophycists who use values of transport coefficients that are old and often unsatisfactory. The few books dealing with the rigorous kinetic theory of a ionized plasma are based on the so called Landau (Fokker-Planck) equation and they seldom relate the microscopic results with their macroscopic counterpart provided by classical non-equilibrium thermodynamics. In this book both issues are thoroughly covered. Starting from the full Boltzmann equation for inert dilute plasmas and using the Hilbert-Chapman-Enskog method to solve the first two approximations in Knudsen´s parameter, we construct all the transport properties of the system within the framework of linear irreversible thermodynamics. This includes a systematic study of all possible cross effects (which, except for a few cases, were never treated in the literature) as well as the famous H-theorem. The equations of magneto-hydrodynamics for dilute plasmas, including the rather surprising results obtained for the viscomagnetic effects, may be now fully assessed. This book will be of immediate interest to the plasma physics community, as well as to astrophysicists. It is also likely to make an impact in the field of cold plasmas, involving laser cooled Rydberg atoms.

A macroscopic system consists of a tremendous number of microscopic atoms and molecules. In thermal equilibrium the state of such a system is uniquely defined, despite the fact that the microscopic particles behave quite randomly. This observation gives rise to the fundamental law of the statistical physics; it allows entropy to be defined and a framework for the theory to be constructed.