Course No.: ENGIN 101 Units: 3 CC Number: 28056 TeleBears

This course satisfies L&S Physical Science breadth and CEE Technical Electives

Instructor: S.W. Hermanowicz, 607 Davis Hall, 642-015, e-mail: hermanowicz@ce.berkeley.edu

Format: 3 hours of lecture, demonstrations and student activities per week

Time and Location: Tue. Thu. 2 - 3:30 212 O'Brien Hall

Course site: www.ce.berkeley.edu/~hermanowicz/e101

Course Objectives: Exploration of diverse concepts in fractal geometry, nonlinear phenomena and their dynamics leading to chaos and complexity. We will try to look at a variety of natural objects and processes, and their mathematical counterparts to see if we can characterize such features as ruggedness, structure, contingency, "butterfly effect". The focus will be on the development of intuition and on applications rather than rigorous mathematical derivations. I hope that you will acquire a new Weltanschauung and start thinking about scaling laws, sensitivity to initial conditions, small changes and large effects.

Grade Requirements: Participation in the class activities, home assignments, term paper, final exam

Required Text: None

Reference Readings:

Addison, Paul S. (1997). Fractals and Chaos: An Illustrated Course, IOP

Cambel., A.B. (1993). Applied Chaos Theory. Academic Press, San Diego

Kaye, B. (1993). Chaos & Complexity. VCH, Weinheim

Other Readings: A reference file in the Engineering library. Additional references listed here

[page top]

Approximate Outline
For more details see Notes and Readings

[page top]