Book Reviews

Abstract

This time, the Book Reviews section has a large portion of books devoted to system dynamics and applications. The section starts with the featured review by Jie Sun on the book Synchronization: From Coupled Systems to Complex Networks by Stefano Boccaletti, Alexander N. Pisarchik, Charo I. Del Genio, and Andreas Amann. The review informs in detail on the content of the book and its relation to the current literature on the subject. One can learn that such a thing as spontaneous symmetry breaking is a mathematical possibility in coupled identical systems, which from many perspectives arouses great interest in this book. System dynamics is also the topic of the book Hidden Dynamics: The Mathematics of Switches, Decisions and Other Discontinuous Behaviour by Mike R. Jeffrey, which is reviewed by Christian Kuehn. Here nonsmooth dynamics are of central interest and discussed in a very inspiring nonstandard manner, as Christian concludes. Biological system dynamics are considered in the volume Understanding Complex Biological Systems with Mathematics, edited by Ami Radunskaya, Rebecca Segal, and Blerta Shtylla. This book is reviewed by Anita Layton, who applauds the editors of the book for organizing the related workshop with a special project-style format and for putting together this volume of research papers. We have four more insightful reviews on methodological and application aspects. Here I would like to put particular emphasis on a young voice in this section. Gennadij Heidel, who finished his Ph.D. this year on a closely related topic, reviews the book Tensor Numerical Methods in Scientific Computing by Boris N. Khoromskij. In the era of data science, well-founded expositions like this should be kept “handy as a reference for tensor methods,” as Gennadij recommends.