Computational Physics is a vigorous subject due to its interdisciplinary nature. In this spirit, the volume brings together lecture notes from leading computational physicists in quite disparate areas of research interest. The resulting collection of essays should be a valuable resource in an area where there are few standard textbooks at the present time.The volume is made up of lecture notes and introductory articles representative of the Summer School on Computational Physics which was held at the Australian National University in 1996. Several of the authors are world-renowned for their contributions to this new — and rapidly evolving — area, and this volume will be a useful supplement to textbooks at the graduate, advanced undergraduate, and professional levels.

Among the several distinct ways of formulating and quantizing a Hamiltonian system, the light cone approach enjoys special status because it has the largest stability group. The aim of this volume is to present recent achievements and open problems in this rather unusual quantization framework to a large audience. The formulation is set up in a comprehensive introduction where the issues are also clearly indicated with specific examples: vacuum structure, signature of non-perturbative effects, chiral symmetry breaking, light cone gauge theories, etc. The following chapters address these topics through a selection of the most relevant contributions presented at Les Houches. This volume should prove valuable to newcomers in the field, and graduates and academics.

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This book arose from a conference organized under the auspices of the Australian Research Council?s Complex Open Systems Research Network (which has become the most prominent for complex systems in the world ? just Google ?complex systems network?), the ANU Centre for Complex Systems, and the Asia-Pacific Center for Theoretical Physics. The book is unique in the scope of its coverage of applications of complex systems science: Extraterrestrial ? astrophysical, solar and space plasmas; Earth System ? climate, ecosystems; Human systems ? brain dynamics, social networks, financial statistics, advanced technologies. It also presents up-to-date discussions of new theoretical approaches, in particular those based on entropy and entropy production maximization, a field still under development but with much promise for providing a much-needed unifying principle for complex systems science. The authors are at the forefront of their fields, and organized their chapters to effectively bring out common features of complex systems. A comprehensive and common lexicon of keywords has been used to unify indexing, thus making the book an invaluable introduction to anyone seeking an overview of complex systems science.