Oxford University Press Nonextensive Entropy: Interdisciplinary Applications (Santa Fe Institute Studies on the Sciences of Complexity)

A great variety of complex phenomena in many scientific fields exhibit power-law behaviour, reflecting a hierarchical or fractal structure. Many of these phenomena seem to be susceptible to description using approaches drawn from thermodynamics or statistical mechanics, particularly approaches involving the maximization of entropy. During recent years a good deal of study has been devoted to a nonextensive generalizations of entropy and of Boltzmann-Gibbs statistical mechanics and standard laws in a natural way. The book addresses the interdisciplinary applications of these ideas, and also on various phenomena that could possibly be quantitatively describable in terms of these ideas.