Customer Reviews

Regular and Stochastic Motion: Applied Mathematical Sciences

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Back in 1983, if a physicist wanted to teach deterministic chaos then this was the only book available, and it served the purpose well (supplemented by Feigenbaum's and Lorentz's papers, among others). There had been earlier math books, Moser's and Arnol'd's, e.g., but they were too hard for most of us. Like Moser and Arnol'd, Lichtenberg and Lieberman concentrated on Hamiltonian systems. One discovered accidentally, later, that von Neuman and Koopman had also studied chaos in a two-degree of freedom Hamiltonian system in one of their papers on ergodic theory in the thirties. Of course, we were all aware of Poincare's earlier work, although nearly no one had read it. In any case, this book is a time piece. Not really written as a text, it had something for everyone. Even a greenhorn could pick out models like the Fermi accelerator and program them graphically on a VIC 20 in order to impress and inspire the class.

In his way a perfect book in Hailtonian Chaos, from pendulus to full stochasticity. I'm always trying to escape from it, cause it's too technical, but a return hapens all the time. Must be used whith a serious look in his own index.