Author Description

This volume is intended for advanced undergraduate or first-year graduate students as an introduction to applied nonlinear dynamics and chaos. The author has placed emphasis on teaching the techniques and ideas that will enable students to take specific dynamical systems and obtain some quantitative information about the behavior of these systems. He has included the basic core material that is necessary for higher levels of study and research. Thus, people who do not necessarily have an extensive mathematical background, such as students in engineering, physics, chemistry, and biology, will find this text as useful as students of mathematics. This new edition contains extensive new material on invariant manifold theory and normal forms (in particular, Hamiltonian normal forms and the role of symmetry). Lagrangian, Hamiltonian, gradient, and reversible dynamical systems are also discussed. Elementary Hamiltonian bifurcations are covered, as well as the basic properties of circle maps. The book contains an extensive bibliography as well as a detailed glossary of terms, making it a comprehensive book on applied nonlinear dynamical systems from a geometrical and analytical point of view.