The basic aim of the NATO Advanced Research Workshop on "New Trends in Nonlinear Dynamics and Pattern-Forming Phenomena: The Geometry of Nonequilibrium" was to bring together researchers from various areas of physics to review and explore new ideas regarding the organisation of systems driven far from equilibrium. Such systems are characterized by a close relationship between broken spatial and tempo ral symmetries. The main topics of interest included pattern formation in chemical systems, materials and convection, traveling waves in binary fluids and liquid crystals, defects and their role in the disorganisa tion of structures, spatio-temporal intermittency, instabilities and large-scale vortices in open flows, the mathematics of non-equilibrium systems, turbulence, and last but not least growth phenomena. Written contributions from participants have been grouped into chapters addressing these different areas. For additional clarity, the first chapter on pattern formation has been subdivided into sections. One of the main concerns was to focus on the unifying features between these diverse topics. The various scientific communities repre sented were encouraged to discuss and compare their approach so as to mutually benefit their respective fields. We hope that, to a large degree, these goals have been met and we thank all the participants for their efforts. The workshop was held in Cargese (Corsica, France) at the Institut d'Etudes Scientifiques from August 2nd to August 12th, 1988. We greatly thank Yves Pomeau and Daniel Walgraef who, as members of the organising committee, gave us valuable advice and encouragements.

Ever since the seminal works on traveling waves and morphogenesis by Fisher, by Kolmogorov, Petrovski and Piscunov, and by Turing, scientists from many disciplines have been fascinated by questions concerning the formation of steady or dynamic patterns in reactive media. Contributions to this volume have been made by chemists, chemical engineers, mathematicians (both pure and applied), and physicists. The topics covered range from reports of experimental studies, through descriptions of numerical experiments, to rather abstract theoretical investigations, each exhibiting different aspects of a very diverse field.

In the many physical phenomena ruled by partial differential equations, two extreme fields are currently overcrowded due to recent considerable developments: 1) the field of completely integrable equations, whose recent advances are the inverse spectral transform, the recursion operator, underlying Hamiltonian structures, Lax pairs, etc 2) the field of dynamical systems, often built as models of observed physical phenomena: turbulence, intermittency, Poincare sections, transition to chaos, etc. In between there is a very large region where systems are neither integrable nor nonintegrable, but partially integrable, and people working in the latter domain often know methods from either 1) or 2). Due to the growing interest in partially integrable systems, we decided to organize a meeting for physicists active or about to undertake research in this field, and we thought that an appropriate form would be a school. Indeed, some of the above mentioned methods are often adaptable outside their original domain and therefore worth to be taught in an interdisciplinary school. One of the main concerns was to keep a correct balance between physics and mathematics, and this is reflected in the list of courses.

In recent years, enormous progress has been made on nonlinear dynamics particularly on chaos and complex phenomena. This unique volume presents the advances made in theory, analysis, numerical simulation and experimental realization, promising novel practical applications on various topics of current interest on chaos and related fields of nonlinear dynamics.Particularly, the focus is on the following topics: synchronization vs. chaotic phenomena, chaos and its control in engineering dynamical systems, fractal-based dynamics, uncertainty and unpredictability measures vs. chaos, Hamiltonian systems and systems with time delay, local/global stability, bifurcations and their control, applications of machine learning to chaos, nonlinear vibrations of lumped mass mechanical/mechatronic systems (rigid body and coupled oscillator dynamics) governed by ODEs and continuous structural members (beams, plates, shells) vibrations governed by PDEs, patterns formation, chaos in micro- and nano-mechanical systems, chaotic reduced-order models, energy absorption/harvesting from chaotic, chaos vs. resonance phenomena, chaos exhibited by discontinuous systems, chaos in lab experiments.The present volume forms an invaluable source on recent trends in chaotic and complex dynamics for any researcher and newcomers to the field of nonlinear dynamics.

Proceedings of a NATO ARW held in Florence, Italy, June 7--13, 1990

Dissipative Structure and Weak Turbulence provides an understanding of the emergence and evolution of structures in macroscopic systems. This book discusses the emergence of dissipative structures. Organized into 10 chapters, this book begins with an overview of the stability of a fluid layer with potentially unstable density stratification in the field of gravity. This text then explains the theoretical description of the dynamics of a given system at a formal level. Other chapters consider several examples of how such simplified models can be derived, complicating the picture progressively to account for other phenomena. This book discusses as well the theory and experiments on plain Rayleigh–Bénard convection by setting first the theoretical frame and deriving the analytical solution of the marginal stability problem. The final chapter deals with building a bridge between chaos as studied in weakly confined systems and more advanced turbulence in the most conventional sense. This book is a valuable resource for physicists.

There exists a wide variety of patterns in nature, from inert matter such as crystalline dendrites and flames, to filamentous fungi and neurones in the living world. Their structural evolution during growth can be theoretically modeled in order to predict the shape of their forms, their dimensions and their growth rate. 'New Visions on Growth and Form' aims at answering such questions by employing different theoretical approaches and providing a critical appraisal. The book belongs to the wide field of non-equilibrium statistical physics, and explores different mechanisms such as transport, interfacial tension, and chemical reactions, which govern the growth of a material. It explains the fundamental equations relating different morphological quantities, as well as the relevant experimental control parameters. From the unifying concepts arising in the theoretical approach the author proposes a tentative description of cell morphogenesis as a further application of the theory.