Nomination of Editors for the Encyclopedia of Dynamical Systems

The Encyclopedia of Dynamical Systems is hosted by Scholarpedia — the free peer-reviewed encyclopedia written by Scholars from around the world. It combines the philosophies of Encyclopedia Britannica and Wikipedia.

The 13th edition of Encyclopedia Britannica has the 'Space-Time' entry written by A. Einstein and 'Psychoanalysis' entry written by S. Freud. If Britannica had the feature of curatorship, physicists and psychologists of today would be fighting each other for the honor to be curators of these articles. The goal of Scholarpedia is to invite today's Einsteins and Freuds to write entries on their major discoveries so that future generation of experts would be willing to maintain these articles via the wiki-style process of curatorship.

Most articles in the Encyclopedia of Dynamical Systems are reserved and many have already been written by the greatest living experts. For example, Yuri Kuznetsov and John Guckenheimer wrote eight articles on various codimension-one and -two bifurcations, Edward Ott wrote four articles, Phil Holmes wrote two articles, John Milnor wrote 'Attractors', Yakov Sinai wrote 'Kolmogorov-Sinai Entropy', Leonid Bunimovich wrote 'Dynamic Billiards', Richard FitzHugh wrote 'FitzHugh-Nagumo Model', Otto Rössler wrote 'Rössler Attractor' (with Christophe Letellier), Philip Holmes wrote 'Stability' (with Eric Shea-Brown). Kiyoshi Itô reserved "Itô Calculus" (Itô is 92), Benoit Mandelbrot reserved 'Mandelbrot Set' and 'Fractals', Neil Fenichel reserved 'Normal Hyperbolicity', Steve Smale reserved 'Smale Horseshoe', Edward Lorenz reserved 'Butterfly Effect', and so on. A sister project at Scholarpedia — Encyclopedia of Computational Neuroscience — has five Nobel Laureates among its authors and reviewers.

The Encyclopedia of Dynamical Systems is scheduled to be printed in 2008, but it will remain freely available online so that its articles can be updated and maintained by the dynamical systems community via the process of curatorship. It will also be used as a seed to start Encyclopedia of Applied Mathematics, and then Encyclopedia of Mathematics.

To achieve this ambitious goal, Scholarpedia established a new privilege — 'Editor' (in addition to 'Scholar' and 'Curator'). Editorial responsibilities include

1. identifying and inviting the original inventors/authors/discoverers for the corresponding topics,
2. initiating election of authors when the original author is no longer alive or when many people made comparable contribution,
3. communicating with the authors and helping them with their articles,
4. initiating and supervising peer-review process.

Each category in Scholarpedia, like 'Differential Equations', 'Synchronization', 'Chaos', etc., will have its own Editor. When the majority of articles in a category are published as part of a printed Encyclopedia, the editor's name appears on the front cover of the Encyclopedia. Currently, Scholarpedia has four editors in dynamical systems: Vadim N. Biktashev (Cardiac Dynamics), James Meiss (Mappings), Soren Dorch (Computational Astrophysics), Skip Thompson (Numerical Analysis).

ditors of Scholarpedia will be elected by the public based on their scholarly achievements and reputation in the field (using the same procedure as election of authors). However, during next few months, Scholarpedia invites editors to test-drive the editorial system. If you would like to join this project as an editor, please send your CV or link to your webpage to the [email protected]. Indicate which category you would like to be considered for. Preference will be given to those experts who have already served on an editorial board of a peer-review journal, those who have already contributed to Scholarpedia (as an author or a reviewer), those who have an equivalent of tenure or tenure-track position, or those who have high Scholar Index.

Eugene M. Izhikevich
Editor-in-Chief of Scholarpedia, the free peer-reviewed encyclopedia..