Wednesday, December 4, 2013

Being Thanked in a Book - A Great Compliment

I love writing books and also reading books.

Every once in a while these two are connected as in the book recently written by Dr. Christian Mullon, "Network Economics of Marine Ecosystems and their Exploitation," and published by CRC Press.

Dr. Mullon in the book's Preface writes: The origin of the idea of applying network economics to ecological problems has been the reading of Anna Nagurney's book: Network Economics, A Variational Inequality Approach. I have found there the level of abstraction, the level of complexity, the mathemtical tools I was seeking for several years to model real marine systems. I acknowledge this influence and I thank her for the collaboration we have initiated since.

Network Economics: A Variational Inequality Approach, was the first book that I ever wrote and it also appeared in a second edition.

I have read Dr. Mullon's book and will continue to go back to it many times as one always does with great books.  It demonstrates, as the first paragraph of the first chapter states, and I fully agree: This book shows how to apply the principles and tools of network economics, such as variational inequalities and complementarity problems, to study large exploited natural systems, especially the marine systems, at a global, continental or regional level. These systems are exposed to both climate change and economic globalization, a phenomenon referred to as "double exposure."

I met Dr. Mullon and his lovely wife in Paris after I spoke at the NetGCoop conference there in October 2011. We had already started our collaboration but had never before then met face to face.

The elegance of his research, which combines theoretical and computational tools with important ecological applications and data, continues to inspire me and I have written about our related work on predator prey networks, which blends economics, operations research, and ecology, as nature's supply chains.

I would like to return the thanks and compliment to Dr. Christian Mullon on his fabulous new book and congratulate him!