ABSTRACT
Many of the fundamental properties of classical dynamical systems were discovered in the last century by people like Poincare and Birkhoff. The revival of the field is closely related to the availability of modern computers to perform the necessary numerical experiments. Dynamical systems are normally regulated by parameters. When the parameters change, so do the properties of the system. In particular, the stability of a system may be investigated by considering the results of small disturbances. Many nonlinear dynamical systems lose stability for no obvious reason, in which case more or less dramatic changes of dynamical patterns take place. The concept phase space is somewhat loosely taken to mean the entire space spanned by the minimum number of dynamical, that is, time-dependent, variables of the problem.
