Elegant Simulations: From Simple Oscillators To Many-body Systems

A recent development is the discovery that simple systems of equations can have chaotic solutions in which small changes in initial conditions have a large effect on the outcome, rendering the corresponding experiments effectively irreproducible and unpredictable. An earlier book in this sequence, Elegant Chaos: Algebraically Simple Chaotic Flows provided several hundred examples of such systems, nearly all of which are purely mathematical without any obvious connection with actual physical processes and with very limited discussion and analysis.In this book, we focus on a much smaller subset of such models, chosen because they simulate some common or important physical phenomenon, usually involving the motion of a limited number of point-like particles, and we discuss these models in much greater detail. As with the earlier book, the chosen models are the mathematically simplest formulations that exhibit the phenomena of interest, and thus they are what we consider 'elegant.'Elegant