Preface

This book has a long history. It grew out of courses on Nonlinear Economic Dynamics (NED), which I have been teaching in the past 20 years at the University of Amsterdam (UvA) and various other places. The NED course has been part of the MSc Econometrics program of the Amsterdam School of Economics, University of Amsterdam since I started at UvA in 1992. I have also taught a condensed version of NED bi-annually between 1996 and 2004 in the Network Algemene en Kwantitatieve Economie (NAKE), a quantitative network of economics PhD courses in the Netherlands. Since 2004 the NED course has been part of the Graduate Program of the Tinbergen Institute, the Graduate school in Economics, Econometrics and Finance in Amsterdam and Rotterdam. More recently, much of the material in this book has been taught at various summerschools and lecture series, in particular the Advanced School on Nonlinear Dynamical Systems in Economics, Udine, Italy, June 2004, the Lecture Series on Heterogeneous Agent Models, Pisa, Italy, June 2006, the Trento Summerschool on Agent-based Finance, Trento, Italy, July 2007 and the International School on Multidisciplinary approaches to Economic and Social Complex Systems, Siena, Italy, June 2010.

I am grateful to many colleagues and friends for inspiration and help over more than two decades. My main PhD thesis advisor at the University of Groningen, Helena Nusse, raised my enthusiasm for chaos and complexity. In Groningen, Floris Takens further deepened my knowledge of nonlinear dynamics and strange attractors, and Ad Pikkemaat taught me the first lessons in mathematical economics. At the University of Amsterdam, this role was taken over by Claus Weddepohl, who was one of the first mathematical economists in the Netherlands and Europe recognizing the importance of nonlinear dynamics and complexity for economics.