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Rating: 
Summary: Effective overview of a useful subject
Review: The subject of dynamical systems has been around for over a century now, having been defined by Henri Poincare in the early 1900s, but having its roots in Hamiltonian and Lagrangian mechanics in the 19th century. In this book ths author has done a fine job of overviewing the subject of dynamical systems, particularly with regards to systems that exhibit chaotic behavior. There are 292 illustrations given in the book, and they effectively assist in the understanding of a sometimes abstract subject. After a brief introduction to the terminology of dynamical systems in Section 1.1, the author moves on to as study of the Poincare map in the next section. Recognizing that the construction of the Poincare map is really an art rather than a science, the author gives several examples of the Poincare map and discusses in detail the properties of each. Structural stability, genericity, transversality are defined, and, as preparation for the material later on, the Poincare map of the damped, forced Duffing oscillator is constructed. The later system serves as the standard example for dynamical systems exhibiting chaotic behavior. The simplification of dynamical systems by means of normal forms is the subject of the next part, which gives a thorough discussion of center manifolds. Unfortunately, the center manifold theorem is not proved, but references to the proof are given. Local bifurcation theory is studied in the next part, with bifurcations of fixed points of vector fields and maps given equal emphasis. The author defines rigorously what it means to bifurcate from a fixed point, and gives a classification scheme in terms of eigenvalues of the linearized map about the fixed point. Most importantly, the author cautions the reader in that dynamical systems having time-dependent parameters and passing through bifurcation values can exhibit behavior that is dramatically different from systems with constant parameters. He does give an interesting example that illustrates this, but does not go into the singular perturbation theory needed for an effective analysis of such systems. An introduction to global bifurcations and chaos is given in the next part, which starts off with a detailed construction of the Smale horseshoe map. Symbolic dynamics, so important in the construction of the actual proof of chaotic behavior is only outlined though, with proofs of the important results delegated to the references. The Conley-Moser conditions are discussed also, with the treatment of sector bundles being the best one I have seen in the literature. The theory is illustrated nicely for the case of two-dimensional maps with homoclinic points. The all-important Melnikov method for proving the existence of transverse homoclinic orbits to hyperbolic periodic orbits is discussed and is by far one of the most detailed I have seen in the literature. The author employs many useful diagrams to give the reader a better intuition behind what is going on. He employs also the pips and lobes terminology of Easton to study the geometry of the homoclinic tangles. Homoclinic bifurcation theory is also treated in great detail. This is followed by an overview of the properties of orbits homoclinic to hyperbolic fixed points. A brief introduction to Lyapunov exponents and strange attractors is also given. This book has served well as a reference book and should be useful to students and other individuals who are interested in going into this area. It is a subject that has found innumerable applications, and it will continue to grow as more tools and better computational facilities are developed to study the properties of dynamical systems.
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