Chaos, Nonlinearity, Complexity: The Dynamical Paradigm of Nature

I think the next century will be the century of complexity. We have already discovered the basic laws that govern matter and understand all the normal situations. We don’t know how the laws ?t together, and what happens under extreme conditions. But I expect we will ?nd a complete uni?ed theory sometime this century. There is no limit to the complexity that we can build using those basic laws. Stephen Hawking, January 2000. We don’t know what we are talking about. Many of us believed that string theory was a very dramatic break with our previous notions of quantum theory. But now we learn that string theory, well, is not that much of a break. The state of physics today is like it was when we were mysti?ed by radioactivity. They were missing something absolutely fundamental. We are missing perhaps something as profound as they were back then. Nobel Laureate David Gross, December 2005. This volume is essentially a compilation of papers presented at the Int- national Workshop on Mathematics and Physics of Complex and Nonlinear Systems that was held at Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, March 14 – 26, 2004 on the theme ChaNoXity: The Nonlinear Dynamics of Nature.