Topic outline

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    • Forum Description: This forum is available for everyone to post messages to. Students can raise questions or discuss issues related to the module. Students are encouraged to post to this forum and it will be checked daily by the module leaders. Students should feel free to reply to other students if they are able to.
  • Week 1: Dynamical systems

  • Week 2: Basin of attraction, attracting and repelling periodic points

  • Week 3: Diffeomorphisms of R

  • Module Description

    Chaos theory is an area of mathematics that studies dynamical systems that are highly sensitive to changes on their conditions. Chaotic systems exhibit, among others, underlying patterns, feedback loops, repetitions, and fractals.
    The main aims of this module are twofold:
    To illustrate (rigorously) how simple deterministic dynamical systems are capable of extremely complicated or chaotic behaviour.
    To make contact with real systems by considering a number of physically motivated examples and defining some of the tools employed to study chaotic systems in practice.
    In our study we will encounter concepts such as, discrete, and continuous dynamical systems, repellers and attractors, Cantor sets, symbolic dynamics, topological conjugacy for maps, fractals, iterated function systems and Julia sets. Ideas and techniques from calculus and geometry will be important tools.

  • Week 4: Fixed points and periodic orbits of diffeomorphisms

  • Week 5: Sharkovskii's Theorem, Logistic maps, period-doubling

  • Week 6: Topological conjugacy, symbolic dynamics

  • Week 7: Test & consolidation week

  • Week 8: Symbolic coding

  • Week 9: Chaos, Cantor sets, Non-escaping sets

  • Week 10: Cantor sets and fractals

  • Week 11: Fractals and Dimension, Iterated Function Systems

  • Week 12: Dimension

  • Syllabus

  • Module aims and learning outcomes

  • assessment

  • teaching team

  • hints and tips

  • where to get help

  • module handbook

  • general course materials

  • coursework

  • exam papers

  • Assessment information

  • Reading List Online

  • Q-Review