  A fully adaptive methodology is developed for reducing the complexity of
large dissipative systems. This represents a significant step towards
extracting essential physical knowledge from complex systems, by addressing the
challenging problem of a minimal number of variables needed to exactly capture
the system dynamics. Accurate reduced description is achieved, by construction
of a hierarchy of slow invariant manifolds, with an embarrassingly simple
implementation in any dimension. The method is validated with the auto-ignition
of the hydrogen-air mixture where a reduction to a cascade of slow invariant
manifolds is observed.
