Complexity is an interdisciplinary program publishing the best research and academic-level teaching on both fundamental and applied aspects of complex systemscutting across all traditional disciplines of the natural and life sciences, engineering, economics, medicine, neuroscience, social and computer science.Complex Systems are systems that comprise many interacting parts with the ability to generate a new quality of macroscopic collective behavior the manifestations of which are the spontaneous formation of distinctive temporal, spatial or functional structures. Models of such systems can be successfully mapped onto quite diverse "real-life" situations like the climate, the coherent emission of light from lasers, chemical reaction-diffusion systems, biological cellular networks, the dynamics of stock markets and of the internet, earthquake statistics and prediction, freeway traffic, the human brain, or the formation of opinions in social systems, to name just some of the popular applications.Although their scope and methodologies overlap somewhat, one can distinguish the following main concepts and tools: self-organization, nonlinear dynamics, synergetics, turbulence, dynamical systems, catastrophes, instabilities, stochastic processes, chaos, graphs and networks, cellular automata, adaptive systems, genetic algorithms and computational intelligence.The three major book publication platforms of the Springer Complexity program are the monograph series "Understanding Complex Systems" focusing on the various applications of complexity, the "Springer Series in Synergetics", which is devoted to the quantitative theoretical and methodological foundations, and the "SpringerBriefs in Complexity" which are concise and topical working reports, case-studies, surveys, essays and lecture notes of relevance to the field. In addition to the books in these two core series, the program also incorporates individual titles ranging from textbooks to major reference works.The Springer Series in Synergetics was founded by Herman Haken in 1977. Since then, the series has evolved into a substantial reference library for the quantitative, theoretical and methodological foundations of the science of complex systems.Through many enduring classic texts, such as Haken's Synergetics and Information and Self-Organization, Gardiner's Handbook of Stochastic Methods, Risken's The Fokker Planck-Equation or Haake's Quantum Signatures of Chaos, the series has made, and continues to make, important contributions to shaping the foundations of the field.The series publishes monographs and graduate-level textbooks of broad and general interest, with a pronounced emphasis on the physico-mathematical approach.More information about this series at