俺推荐一个入门的《Chaos Theory Tamed》<BR><BR>这本书虽然没有一点公式,但也不是科普水平。下面是作者的话:<BR><BR>Virtually every branch of the sciences, engineering, economics, and related fields now discusses or refers to chaos. James Gleick's 1987 book, Chaos: making a new science and a 1988 one-hour television program on chaos aroused many people's curiosity and interest. There are now quite a few books on the subject. Anyone writing yet another book, on any topic, inevitably goes through the routine of justifying it. My justification consists of two reasons: <BR><BR>Most books on chaos, while praiseworthy in many respects, use a high level of math. Those books have been written by specialists for other specialists, even though the authors often label them "introductory." Amato A992) refers to a "cultural chasm" between "the small group of mathematically inclined initiates who have been touting" chaos theory, on the one hand, and most scientists (and, I might add, "everybody else"), on the other. There are relatively few books for those who lack a strong mathematics and physics background and who might wish to explore chaos in a particular field. (More about this later in the Preface.) <BR><BR>Most books, in my opinion, don't provide understandable derivations or explanations of many key <BR>concepts, such as Kolmogorov-Sinai entropy, dimensions, Fourier analysis, Lyapunov exponents, and <BR>others. At present, the best way to get such explanations is either to find a personal guru or to put in gobs of frustrating work studying the brief, condensed, advanced treatments given in technical articles. <BR><BR>Chaos is a mathematical subject and therefore isn't for everybody. However, to understand the fundamental concepts, you don't need a background of anything more than introductory courses in algebra, trigonometry, geometry, and statistics. That's as much as you'll need for this book. (More advanced work, on the other hand, does require integral calculus, partial differential equations, computer programming, and similar topics.) <BR><BR>In this book, I assume no prior knowledge of chaos, on your part. Although chaos covers a broad range of topics, I try to discuss only the most important ones. I present them hierarchically. Introductory background perspective takes up the first two chapters. Then come seven chapters consisting of selected important material (an auxiliary toolkit) from various fields. Those chapters provide what I think is a good and necessary foundation—one that can be arduous and time consuming to get from other sources. Basic and simple chaos- related concepts follow. They, in turn, are prerequisites for the slightly more advanced concepts that make up the later chapters. (That progression means, in turn, that some chapters are on a very simple level, others on a <BR>more advanced level.) In general, I try to present a plain-vanilla treatment, with emphasis on the idealized case of low-dimensional, noise-free chaos. That case is indispensable for an introduction. Some real-world data, in contrast, often require sophisticated and as-yet-developing methods of analysis. I don't discuss those techniques. <BR><BR>The absence of high-level math of course doesn't mean that the reading is light entertainment. Although there's no way to avoid some specialized terminology, I define such terms in the text as well as in a Glossary. Besides, learning and using a new vocabulary (a new language) is fun and exciting. It opens up a new world. <BR><BR>My goal, then, is to present a basic, semitechnical introduction to chaos. The intended audience consists of chaos nonspecialists who want a foothold on the fundamentals of chaos theory, regardless of their cademic level. Such nonspecialists may not be comfortable with the more formal mathematical approaches that some books follow. Moreover, many readers (myself included) often find a formal writing style more difficult to understand. With this wider and less mathematically inclined readership in mind, I have deliberately kept the writing informal—"we'll" instead of "we will," "I'd" instead of "I would," etc. Traditionalists who are used to a formal style may be uneasy with this. Nonetheless, I hope it will help reduce the perceived distance between <BR>subject and reader. <BR>
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