Abstract
The understanding of chaos and strange attractors is one of the most exciting areas of mathematics today. It is the question of how the asymptotic behaviour of deterministic systems can exhibit unpredictability and apparent chaos, due to sensitive dependence upon initial conditions, and yet at the same time preserve a coherent global structure. The field represents a remarkable confluence of several different strands of thought. 1. Firstly came the influence of differential topology, giving global geometric insight and emphasis on qualitative properties. By qualitative properties I mean invariants under differentiable changes of coordinates, as opposed to quantitative properties which are invariant only under linear changes of coordinates. To give an example of this influence, I recall a year-long symposium at Warwick in 1979/80, which involved sustained interaction between pure mathematicians and experimentalists, and one of the most striking consequences of that interaction was a transformation in the way that experimentalists now present their data. It is generally in a much more translucent form: instead of merely plotting a frequency spectrum and calling the incomprehensible part ‘noise’, they began to draw computer pictures of underlying three-dimensional strange attractors.
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