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book announcement

  • To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
  • Subject: [mg2785] book announcement
  • From: gaylord at ux1.cso.uiuc.edu (richard j. gaylord)
  • Date: Sun, 17 Dec 1995 02:06:22 -0500
  • Organization: university of illinois

note: if self-advertising offends you, please don't read the rest of this
message, which announces the forthcoming publication of a new book, along
with the comments on the manuscript by one of its reviewers who suggested
that it would be a good idea to post an announcement of the book up on the
net to people.


"Modeling Nature with Cellular Automata using Mathematica" 

by

Richard J. Gaylord and Kazume Nishidate

publisher: TELOS/Springer-Verlag

to be published in Spring 1996

 Table of Contents 

The what, why and how of this book
 1 - A toolkit for cellular automata programming in Mathematica
 2 - The Game of Life
 3 - Traffic engineering: routing and traffic flow
 4 - Phase ordering: spinoidal decomposition and microphase separation  
 5 - Solidification
 6 - Snowflakes
 7 - Interacting random walkers
 8 - Interfacial diffusion fronts and gradient percolation
 9 - Two-species driven diffusion 
10 - Coalescence
11 - Adsorption-desorption
12 - Chemotaxis
13 - Ant colony activity
14 - Predator-prey ecosystems
15 - Contagion in exciteable media
16 - Evolution of cooperation: the spatial prisoner's dilemma

Appendix: Programming with Mathematica tutorial 
manipulating lists
everthing is an expression
atomic, non-atomic, compound expressions
how expressions are evaluated
the order of evaluation
controlling the order of evaluation
pattern-matching
blanks
conditional pattern- matching
rewrite rules and transformation rules
the Set (=) function
the SetDelayed (:=) function
placing constraints on rewrite rules
localizing names
ordering rewrite rules
the Rule (->) function
the RuleDelayed (:>) function
the functional programming style
nested function calls
anonymous functions
using higher-order functions


====================

un-cut statements taken from a review of the manuscript

[note: i do not personally know the reviewer. he was sent the manuscript
by the publisher who was seeking objective opinions on the merits of the
work prior to proceeding with its publication"]

"As a researcher involved in some of the areas touched upon in this volume,
I found myself wanting the software immediately, in order to start
investigating a number of questions that have been bugging me for awhile"

"My mind immediately conjured up things I wanted to do"

"While I'm a very busy man, I cannot wait to first play around with these
programs, and then to seriously modify them to conduct my own research"

"This is not a text book, nor it is a monograph. It is a clever-tool book,
or clever tool-book"

"I am absolutely overwhelmed by the power of the tools presented here"

"I understand the amount of work that usually goes into writing software
that does what it is supposed to do, and as a consequence I am shocked,
sometimes embarrassed, to see how little one has to do once one has
mastered Mathematica"

"What is important is how many things can be done, with so little
investment of time"

"I have very little doubt that the tools introduced here will seep into the
research community"

"I am somewhat surprised (jaded by the amount of secrecy that is prevalent
in many areas of research) how freely the authors give away tools that even
undergraduates can use to obtain publishable answers to modern questions
rather rapidly"

"Those who will benefit most from it will be be people actively involved in
research concerned with complex phenomena, whether in academia or industry"

"There should be a considerable market for people that used to be in
Science, or have a Science bachelors degree, that like to play with these
things in their free time, unrelated to their daily work"

-- 
"if you're not programming functionally, then you're programming dysfunctionally"


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