This book, based on lectures given at the Accademia dei Lincei, is an
accessible and leisurely account of systems that display a chaotic time
evolution. This behaviour, though deterministic, has features more
characteristic of stochastic systems. The analysis here is based on a
statistical technique known as time series analysis and so avoids
complex mathematics, yet provides a good understanding of the
fundamentals. Professor Ruelle is one of the world's authorities on
chaos and dynamical systems and his account here will be welcomed by
scientists in physics, engineering, biology, chemistry and economics who
encounter nonlinear systems in their research.