ABSTRACT
Almost anything around us that evolves over time can be thought of as a dynamical system, the word “dynamic” having the connotation of a force that produces change in its state. The use of mathematics to study motion is a recent venture, usually traced to the development of calculus. Prior to that, the language of mathematics was mostly employed in the study of static patterns and structures, as in geometry that can be traced to the earliest civilizations. One of the first attempts to understand time-evolution is the study of integer sequence generating processes, one of the most famous of which is attributed to the medieval Italian mathematician, Fibonacci (c.1170-c.1250) [Devlin 2011]. In his book Liber Abaci (1202), through which the Arabic (or, rather Indian) numerals were introduced in Europe, Fibonacci described a problem concerning a growing rabbit population to illustrate certain aspects of the new system of numbering [Fibonacci 2003]:
A certain man had one pair of rabbits together in a certain enclosed space, and one wishes to know how many are created from the pair in one year when it is the nature of them in a single month to bear another pair, and in the second month those born to bear also.
