Pietro Pantano

Pietro Pantano is a Full Professor of Mathematical Physics at the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Calabria. His research interests are multidisciplinary, covering several different areas of research. These include Theory of Complexity and self-Organizing Systems, Discrete and Continuous Dynamical Systems, Chua's oscillator, Biological Models based on Cellular Automata, Artificial Life, and Generative and Evolutionary Music. Prof. Pantano has published more than 300 scientific papers and has co-authored several books. These include “Ray methods for nonlinear waves in fluids and plasmas” published in 1993 by Longman Scientific and “A Gallery of Chua Attractors” published in 2008 by World Scientific Publishing. Images from papers co-authored by Prof. Pantano have been use as covers for the journals “Complexity” and the “International Journal of Bifurcation and Chaos.” Prof. Pantano is currently co-director of the Evolutionary systems Group (ESG) at the University of Calabria. He is co-author of a patent for a sound synthesizer exploiting chaotic dynamics.

Publications

Cellular Automata and Complex Systems: Methods for Modeling Biological Phenomena
Cellular Automata and Complex Systems: Methods for Modeling Biological Phenomena
Eleonora Bilotta, Pietro Pantano. © 2010. 502 pages.
Cellular Automata (CA) are a class of spatially and temporally discrete mathematical systems characterized by local interaction and synchronous dynamical evolution, which show...
Outline
Outline
Eleonora Bilotta, Pietro Pantano. © 2010. 16 pages.
Ever more frequently, contemporary science finds itself in situations in which the only way it can address the complexity of nature is to develop new methods. One of the most...
Basic Definitions
Basic Definitions
Eleonora Bilotta, Pietro Pantano. © 2010. 34 pages.
Cellular Automata (CAs) are discrete dynamic systems that exhibit chaotic behavior and self-organization and lend themselves to description in rigorous mathematical terms. The...
Modelling Biological Systems
Modelling Biological Systems
Eleonora Bilotta, Pietro Pantano. © 2010. 32 pages.
What are the mechanisms underlying biological systems’ ability to transform themselves: the ability of structures to replicate for their own goals, or to meet the specific goals...
Emergent Structures
Emergent Structures
Eleonora Bilotta, Pietro Pantano. © 2010. 31 pages.
There are two classes of problem in the study of Cellular Automata. The forward. problem is the problem of determining the properties of the system. Solutions often consist of...
Cellular Automata Metrics
Cellular Automata Metrics
Eleonora Bilotta, Pietro Pantano. © 2010. 36 pages.
There have been many attempts to understand complexity and to represent it in terms of computable quantities. To date, however, these attempts have had little success. Although...
The Discovery of Complex Rules
The Discovery of Complex Rules
Eleonora Bilotta, Pietro Pantano. © 2010. 35 pages.
After Wolfram’s proposal, other authors analyzed systems of CAs and proposed their own classifications (Gutowitz 1990; Li, Packard, and Langton 1990). Kurka (1997) proposed to...
Searching for Self-Replicating Systems
Searching for Self-Replicating Systems
Eleonora Bilotta, Pietro Pantano. © 2010. 25 pages.
In Complexity Science (Bak, 1996; Morin, 2001; Gell-Mann, 1994; Prigogine & Stengers, 1984) and Artificial Life (Langton, 1995; Adami, 1998), almost all attempts to simulate or...
Lifelike Self-Replicators
Lifelike Self-Replicators
Eleonora Bilotta, Pietro Pantano. © 2010. 38 pages.
The concept of a cellular automaton derives from John von Neumann’s studies of the logic of life. In these studies, von Neumann focused on self-replicating structures with...
Language Structures in Cellular Automata
Language Structures in Cellular Automata
Eleonora Bilotta, Pietro Pantano. © 2010. 34 pages.
The ingenuity of nature and the power of DNA have generated an infinite range of languages - including human language. The existence of these languages inspires us to design...
Models of Self-Replicators
Models of Self-Replicators
Eleonora Bilotta, Pietro Pantano. © 2010. 33 pages.
Structural models and patterns are vitally important for human beings. From birth, we base our emotional and cognitive representations of the external world on species-specific...
A Genetic Approach to the Study of Self-Replication
A Genetic Approach to the Study of Self-Replication
Eleonora Bilotta, Pietro Pantano. © 2010. 47 pages.
The basic mechanisms underlying development have long been a focus of attention for biological research. Development - or morphogenesis - involves a special sequence of...
The Universal Constructor
The Universal Constructor
Eleonora Bilotta, Pietro Pantano. © 2010. 17 pages.
At the beginning of the 1950s, John von Neumann (1966) asked himself whether it is possible to design a machine with the ability to create exact copies of itself which would...
A Zoo of Self-Replicators
A Zoo of Self-Replicators
Eleonora Bilotta, Pietro Pantano. © 2010. 48 pages.
Our basic metaphor: in this chapter, we present a taxonomy of self-replicators - as if they were animals in a zoo. In the zoo, we play the role of an external observer (a...
Rhythms of Life
Rhythms of Life
Eleonora Bilotta, Pietro Pantano. © 2010. 32 pages.
It is widely recognized that the birth of modern science dates to the moment when Galileo first timed physical processes taking place in space. In biology, it is only recently...
From Rhythm to Sound and Music
From Rhythm to Sound and Music
Eleonora Bilotta, Pietro Pantano. © 2010. 27 pages.
In early 1950s, Iannis Xenakis became the first composer to use stochastic processes to generate pieces of music, working by hand. The first entirely computer-generated...