This book for physicists, biologists, computer scientists, economists or social scientists shows in selected examples how computer simulation methods which are typical to statistical physics have been applied in other areas outside of physics. Our main part deals with the biology of ageing, while other examples are the functioning of the immune system, the structure of DNA, the fluctuations on the stock market, theories for sociology and for World War II. Are leaky water faucets similar to our heartbeats? Throughout the book we emphasize microscopic models dealing with the action of individuals, whether they are cells of the immune system or traders speculating on the currency market. Complete computer programs are given and explained for biological ageing. The references try to introduce the expert from the covered other fields to the relevant physics literature; and they also show the physicists the way into the biological literature on ageing.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Parallel Processing and Applied Mathematics, PPAM 2002, held in Naleczow, Poland, in September 2001. The 101 papers presented were carefully reviewed and improved during two rounds of reviewing and revision. The book offers topical sections on distributed and grid architectures, scheduling and load balancing, performance analysis and prediction, parallel non-numerical algorithms, parallel programming, tools and environments, parallel numerical algorithms, applications, and evolutionary computing and neural networks.

The proceedings of the Third Nikkei Econophysics Symposium, "Business Models in the 21st Century - Risk Management and Expectations for Econophysics," held in Tokyo in November 2004, are gathered herein. Cutting-edge research on the practical application of econophysics is included, covering such topics as the predictability of markets, the analysis of rare events, the mechanism of crashes and bubbles, markets’ correlation and risk management, investment strategy, stochastic market simulations, agent-based market simulations, wealth distribution, and network structures in economics, most of which are beyond the scope of standard financial technology. New market models and financial-data analysis methods are introduced, and dynamic aspects of markets and economy are highlighted. Professionals, researchers, and students will find an invaluable resource in this first book of its kind to summarize the latest work in the field of econophysics.

This volume contains pedagogical and elementary introductions to genetics for mathematicians and physicists as well as to mathematical models and techniques of population dynamics. It also offers a physicist's perspective on modeling biological processes. Each chapter starts with an overview followed by the recent results obtained by authors. Lectures are self-contained and are devoted to various phenomena such as the evolution of the genetic code and genomes, age-structured populations, demography, sympatric speciation, the Penna model, LotkaVolterra and other predator-prey models, evolutionary models of ecosystems, extinctions of species, and the origin and development of language. Authors analyze their models from the computational and mathematical points of view.

The scientific study of complex systems has transformed a wide range of disciplines in recent years, enabling researchers in both the natural and social sciences to model and predict phenomena as diverse as earthquakes, global warming, demographic patterns, financial crises, and the failure of materials. In this book, Didier Sornette boldly applies his varied experience in these areas to propose a simple, powerful, and general theory of how, why, and when stock markets crash. Most attempts to explain market failures seek to pinpoint triggering mechanisms that occur hours, days, or weeks before the collapse. Sornette proposes a radically different view: the underlying cause can be sought months and even years before the abrupt, catastrophic event in the build-up of cooperative speculation, which often translates into an accelerating rise of the market price, otherwise known as a "bubble." Anchoring his sophisticated, step-by-step analysis in leading-edge physical and statistical modeling techniques, he unearths remarkable insights and some predictions--among them, that the "end of the growth era" will occur around 2050. Sornette probes major historical precedents, from the decades-long "tulip mania" in the Netherlands that wilted suddenly in 1637 to the South Sea Bubble that ended with the first huge market crash in England in 1720, to the Great Crash of October 1929 and Black Monday in 1987, to cite just a few. He concludes that most explanations other than cooperative self-organization fail to account for the subtle bubbles by which the markets lay the groundwork for catastrophe. Any investor or investment professional who seeks a genuine understanding of looming financial disasters should read this book. Physicists, geologists, biologists, economists, and others will welcome Why Stock Markets Crash as a highly original "scientific tale," as Sornette aptly puts it, of the exciting and sometimes fearsome--but no longer quite so unfathomable--world of stock markets.

We all know the hard fact: neither wealth nor income is ever uniform for us all. Justified or not, they are unevenly distributed; few are rich and many are poor! Investigations for more than hundred years and the recent availability of the income distribution data in the internet (made available by the finance ministries of various countries; from the tax return data of the income tax departments) have revealed some remarkable features. Irrespective of many differences in culture, history, language and, to some extent, the economic policies followed in different countries, the income distribution is seen to fol low a particular universal pattern. So does the wealth distribution. Barring an initial rise in population with income (or wealth; for the destitutes), the population decreases either exponentially or in a log-normal way for the ma jority of 'middle income' group, and it eventually decreases following a power law (Pareto law, following Vilfredo Pareto's observation in 1896) for the rich est 5-10 % of the population! This seems to be an universal feature - valid for most of the countries and civilizations; may be in ancient Egypt as well! Econophysicists tried to view this as a natural law for a statistical ma- body-dynamical market system, analogous to gases, liquids or solids: classical or quantum.