Dimensions and Entropies in Chaotic Systems

This volume contains a collection of papers on methods for the quantification of chaotic dynamical systems. New developments in the theory of nonlinar dynamical systems show that irregular behavior can be generated by deterministic systems with very few degrees of freedom. The concepts of fractal dimensions, dynamical entropies and Lyapunov exponents have been introduced in order to estimate the number of degrees of freedom involved in a given signal or time series. This book provides insight into the mathematical problems of dimensional analysis of erratic data, into the problems of its numerical implementation, and also into its practical realization in a series of different experiments. The limits of predictability of chaotic systems and the reliability and accuracy of different methods for computing dimensions are discussed. New experimental results on spatio-temporal chaos, dimensions of clouds, lasers, brain waves, and hydrodynamical and solid state systems are presented.