Synergetics and Complexity: Emerging New Science and Civilization at the Turn of the Century

Abstract

The theory of nonlinear complex systems has become a successful problem solving approach in the natural sciences of physics, chemistry and biology. It is now recognized that many of our social, economical, ecological, and physical problems are also of a global, complex, and nonlinear nature. And one of the most exciting contemporary topics is the idea that even the human brain and mind is governed largely by the nonlinear dynamics of complex systems. Synergetics aims at mathematical and computational models with nonlinear dynamics and well-defined order parameters. These methods are sometimes said to foreshadow the new sciences of complexity characterizing the scientific development of the 21st century [1].