Self-Organized Criticality: Emergent Complex Behavior in Physical and Biological Systems (Cambridge Lecture Notes in Physics, Series Number 10) 1st Edition

This book is the first attempt to condense in a single text a mathematical introduction to the emergent field of self organized criticality (SOC). The author describes the main general ideas of SOC in the first two chapters. In the third chapter there are a presentation of some systems that can exhibit SOC. The fourth chapter is a presentation and a study of "toy models" in the spirit of SOC. The fifth chapter is about the search of a general mathematical formalism for SOC, which is still an open question. The author presents in this chapter some formalisms developed to explain SOC. In the last chapter, the author discusses essentialy to what extent we can observe SOC behaviour in real systems. There are five appendices, and the first three of these appendices present FORTRAN codes for three distinct toy models. I did not rate this book as five stars because in my opinion the author is very concise in some parts of the text. But this is a good book, and can be recommended to all those interested in the field of self organized criticality.

This book deserves 5 stars because it gives crystal-clear, precise, brutally honest and unbiased coverage of what "Self-Organized Criticality" is and what it is not. Don't waste your time reading Bak's book, read this one instead.