Phase space—the playing field

We'll begin by setting up the arena or playing field. One of the best ways to understand a dynamical system is to make those dynamics visual. A good way to do that is to draw a graph. Two popular kinds of graph show a system's dynamics. One is the ordinary time-series graph that we've already discussed (Fig. 1.1). Usually, that's just a two-dimensional plot of some variable (on the vertical axis, or ordinate) versus time (on the horizontal axis, or abscissa).