Many natural phenomena (cell division, the bursting of bubbles, the collapse of buildings, and so on) involve discontinuous changes, whereas the majority of applied mathematics is directed toward modeling continuous processes. On the other hand,...

Catastrophe theory, or singularity theory, attempts to explain how discontinuous effects can arise from continuous causes. For example, a forest abruptly terminates and turns into a meadow, even though the weather conditions on each side of the...

General mathematical theory of planes in n-dimensional spaces. Singularities (i.e. ‘catastrophes’) frequently arise for the descriptive functions in sections of such planes. With some imagination one can interpret such sections as dynamic...

The applied mathematical study of discon-tinuities which states how many stable equilibria exist given a choice of control variables but does not indicate which of them will be in a particular system. A ‘catastrophe’ occurs when transition...

In mathematics, catastrophe theory is a branch of bifurcation theory in the study of dynamical systems; it is also a particular special case of more general singularity theory in geometry. Bifurcation theory studies and classifies phenomena...

LIKE all mortals, physicists fall prey to fashion. In the 1970s catastrophe theory was all the rage. In the 1980s mathematical chaos and fractals were as trendy in scientific circles as monetarism and perestroika were elsewhere. And in the 1990s? Self-organised criticality-apart from...

Professor Rosser set out to create a single-volume encyclopedia covering the broad sweep of economic applications for bifurcation theory (the field encompassing the non-linear math specialties of catastrophe and chaos), and to a great extent he has succeeded. For the economist wanting an...