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Title: From a chemical viewpoint
Review: Complexity is a topic that has been discussed in chemistry for several decades, as witness Ilya Prigogine's seminal works on this issue. For chemists wanting a good current expository text, that does not assume any prior knowledge of it, try this work by Rouvray.There is much overlap between studying complexity and information theory. Indeed, this book has a chapter devoted to Shannon's theories. But, as befits a book for chemists, that chapter is toward the end. Instead, Rouvray talks about complexity in the context of thermodynamics. [You do remember most of your thermo books, don't you?] Then we are shown how complexity can be quantified in so-called complexity indices, for various molecules.Then there is a discussion of how molecular complexity might be correlated to the difficulty of synthesis of such molecules. Hopefully, your chemical intuition can come into play, making complexity far more understandable.
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