Lyapunov analysis: from dynamical systems theory to applications

Preface The study of deterministic laws of evolution has characterized the development of science since Newton's times. Chaos, namely the manifestation of irregular and unpredictable dynamics (not random but look random [1]), entered the debate on determinism at the end of the 19th century with the discovery of sensitivity to initial conditions, meaning that small infinitesimal differences in the initial state might lead to dramatic differences at later times. Poincaré [2, 3] was the first to realize that solutions of the three-body problem are generically highly sensitive to initial conditions. At about the same time, this property was recognized in geodesic flows with negative curvature by Hadamard [4]. One of the first experimental observations of chaos, as understood much later, was when irregular noise was heard by Van der Pol in 1927 [5] while studying a periodically forced nonlinear oscillator. Nevertheless, it was only with the advent of digital computing that chaos started to attract the interest of the wider scientific community. ... ...