front cover -- copyright page -- title page -- Preface -- Acknowledgements -- Introduction -- What is a collapse? -- Shades of Hitchcock, and other tales -- What might tomorrow bring? -- What this book aims to do -- Predicting Unpredictable Events -- Like a thief in the night? -- Chance and regularity -- A quick statistics primer -- Normal regularity: the good, the bad, and the miraculous -- Abnormal regularity: extreme value statistics -- Getting things right with heavy-tailed distributions -- The dangers from getting your probabilities wrong -- Group Behavior: Crowds, Herds, and Video Games -- Fire! -- Birds, boids, and bicycles -- The Monte Carlo world -- Models with probabilities -- People, properties, and political systems -- Connections to other chapters -- Evolution and Collapse: Game Playing in a Changing World -- My New Hampshire -- Strategies and games -- Iterated and evolutionary game playing -- Modeling the evolution of species and cultures -- Implications for understanding collapse -- Instability, Oscillation, and Feedback -- Sharing an electric blanket and other challenges -- Primer on differential equations -- Stable and unstable equilibrium points and related concepts -- The dynamics of interacting populations -- Structural collapses and related processes -- The science of trying to maintain control -- The Chernobyl disaster -- Nonlinearity: Invitation to Chaos and Catastrophe -- The elephant's toenail -- Local linearity -- Bifurcations, tipping points, and catastrophes -- Hysteresis: where there may be no simple turning back -- Chaos: beginning with a butterfly -- It's All About Networks -- How's your networking? -- Network fundamentals -- Important variations in network macrostructure -- Unexpected network crashes -- Interactive dynamics across networks -- Spreading processes through networks -- A surprising game on a network.

Networks in an evolutionary context -- Putting It All Together: Looking at Collapse Phenomena in ``6-D'' -- A quick review -- The utility of multiple perspectives in understanding the risk of collapse -- Where to go from here: the modern field of complexity theory -- References -- Index -- About the Author.