This book will appeal to the lay-reader with an interest in the history of what is today termed ‘Econophysics’, looking at various works throughout the ages that have led to the emergence of this field. It begins with a discussion of the philosophers and scientists who have contributed to this discipline, before moving on to considering the contributions of different institutions, books, journals and conferences in nurturing the subject.

Filling the gap for an up-to-date textbook in this relatively new interdisciplinary research field, this volume provides readers with a thorough and comprehensive introduction. Based on extensive teaching experience, it includes numerous worked examples and highlights in special biographical boxes some of the most outstanding personalities and their contributions to both physics and economics. The whole is rounded off by several appendices containing important background material.

Using tricks to handle coupled nonlinear dynamical many-body systems, several advancements have already been made in understanding the behavior of markets/economic/social systems and their dynamics. The book intends to provide the reader with updated reviews on such major developments in both econophysics and sociophysics, by leading experts in the respective fields. This is the first book providing a panoramic view of these developments in the last decade.

Empirical laws are rare in economics. This book describes efforts to anchor economic knowledge to invariant empirical laws. It links 17th and 18th century Galilean monetary economists to econophysics, a field that emerged in the mid-1990s. This virtual journey from past to present is charted by episodes on aggregates and empirical primacy. It includes the virtually unknown story of 19th century scholars who, by searching for a stricter mathematical approach, paved the way to an ‘engineering’ view of economics. Then there are celebrities like Pareto and his first empirical law governing the distribution of wealth. Pareto and Amoroso sparked a debate on the skewed distribution that spanned decades, ranging from finance to market transformations, to econophysics, with its concepts and tools inherited from statistical physics. The last stage of the journey goes through econophysics and the recent gradual advances it has made, which show how its position vis-à-vis economics has been changing.

This book presents the proceedings from ECONOPHYS-2015, an international workshop held in New Delhi, India, on the interrelated fields of “econophysics” and “sociophysics”, which have emerged from the application of statistical physics to economics and sociology. Leading researchers from varied communities, including economists, sociologists, financial analysts, mathematicians, physicists, statisticians, and others, report on their recent work, discuss topical issues, and review the relevant contemporary literature. A society can be described as a group of people who inhabit the same geographical or social territory and are mutually involved through their shared participation in different aspects of life. It is possible to observe and characterize average behaviors of members of a society, an example being voting behavior. Moreover, the dynamic nature of interaction within any economic sector comprising numerous cooperatively interacting agents has many features in common with the interacting systems of statistical physics. It is on these bases that interest has grown in the application within sociology and economics of the tools of statistical mechanics. This book will be of value for all with an interest in this flourishing field.

Econophysics is a newborn field of science bridging economics and physics. A special feature of this new science is the data analysis of high-precision market data. In economics arbitrage opportunity is strictly denied; however, by observing high-precision data we can prove the existence of arbitrage opportunity. Also, financial technology neglects the possibility of market prediction; however, in this book you can find many examples of predicted events. There are other surprising findings. This volume is the proceedings of a workshop on "application of econophysics" at which leading international researchers discussed their most recent results.