Introduction

Chaos is an aperiodic long-term behavior in a deterministic system that exhibits sensitive dependence on initial conditions.1

The three components of the definition are clarified as follows:

1. “Aperiodic long-term behavior” means that the system’s trajectory in phase space does not settle down to any fixed points (steady state), periodic orbits, or quasi-periodic solutions as time tends to infinity. This part of the definition differentiates aperiodicity due to chaotic dynamics from the transient aperiodicity of, for example, a periodically oscillating system that has been momentarily perturbed.