Recently on my Facebook news feed I found one article, which was rather interesting. "Teaching mathematics differently?" - ironical thought crossed my mind, while at the same time recalling some stand up comedians telling "wild" stories about the problem-based learning. It is truly funny to hear that children nowadays are forced to help the squirrel to count the nuts! Or to solve another default setup: "10 apples + 4 pears = 48 Litas, while 5 apples + 6 pears = 32 Litas, if so then how many Litas does a single apple or pear cost?" Why should anyone solve this problem in this way? Can't the client just look up the price tags? Or check his receipt?

Econophysics is not a very well known interdisciplinary field of research in Lithuania. There are very few Lithuania based scientists who are related to this very young and rapidly developing branch of Physics. Therefore we, being ones of the few, feel an obligation to introduce Econophysics to the other scientists, businessmen and the whole broader society. In this text we will discuss the basic ideas, current trends and the most common problems relevant to the field of Econophysics.

The name of Econophysics implies the application of physics, mostly the methods taken from Statistical Physics, to the Economics. Though until recently most of the econophysicists used to focus on the financial markets. Currently the field is expanding very rapidly and now concerns something more than just regular Economics or Finance - many physicists now attempt to tackle problems in the other social sciences. For these broader approaches there are other overlapping terms including Sociophysics, Physics of Risk, Physics of Socio-Economic Systems and other.

At this point we would like to stop the discussion on the use of the terminology. Recall that the aim of this text is somewhat different from that. We aim to familiarize you with the Econophysics!

The creators of the well known science related web comic offer everybody a chance to become familiar with the open access philosophy (video taken from https://www.phdcomics.com/comics.php?n=1533).

Previously, approximately 2 years ago, we have written that we published a review of our works [1] in a book by open-access publisher. Recently we discovered that during the recent two and a half years this books was downloaded almost 7000 times (namely 8 times per day). It was downloaded by the people all around the world - with the USA, China, India, Japan, Germany being the most active countries in the process. It is an excellent result!

While being happy with excellent "diffusion" of our ideas via open-access publisher, we would also like to speak about the improving statistics of the Physics of Risk website. In 2012 we expect to be visited 12 thousand times! It is slightly better than in 2011, in which we had 11 thousand visits. Improvement is small, yet promising a bright future.

In October 2012 our group has familiarized themselves with this interesting theory. Few seminars, which were held at VU ITPA, on the stochastic theory of nonequilibrium steady states were read by dr. Julius Ruseckas, one the researchers in our group. This theory is discussed in two articles recently published in the Physical Reports journal [1, 2]. Read on for the links to the articles.

References

• X.-J. Zhang, H. Qian, M. Qian. Stochastic theory of nonequilibrium steady states and its applications. Part I. Physics Reports 510 (1-2), 2012: 1-86. doi: 10.1016/j.physrep.2011.09.002.
• H. Ge, M. Qian, H. Qian. Stochastic theory of nonequilibrium steady states. Part II: Applications in chemical biophysics. Physics Reports 510: 87-118 (2012). doi: 10.1016/j.physrep.2011.09.001.