Over the past years the field of synergetics has been mushrooming. An
ever- increasing number of scientific papers are published on the
subject, and numerous conferences all over the world are devoted to it.
Depending on the particular aspects of synergetics being treated, these
conferences can have such varied titles as "Nonequilibrium Nonlinear
Statistical Physics," "Self-Organization," "Chaos and Order," and
others. Many professors and students have expressed the view that the
present book provides a good introduction to this new field. This is
also reflected by the fact that it has been translated into Russian,
Japanese, Chinese, German, and other languages, and that the second
edition has also sold out. I am taking the third edition as an
opportunity to cover some important recent developments and to make the
book still more readable. First, I have largely revised the section on
self-organization in continuously extended media and entirely rewritten
the section on the Benard instability. Sec- ond, because the methods of
synergetics are penetrating such fields as eco- nomics, I have included
an economic model on the transition from full employ- ment to
underemployment in which I use the concept of nonequilibrium phase
transitions developed elsewhere in the book. Third, because a great many
papers are currently devoted to the fascinating problem of chaotic
motion, I have added a section on discrete maps. These maps are widely
used in such problems, and can reveal period-doubling bifurcations,
intermittency, and chaos.