Abstract
Chapters 1–3 of these lectures were given at the University of Oslo during my academic free half-year August l985–January 1986 which I spent at the Institute for Energy Technology (IFE). Chapter 4 was given by T Riste during my journeys to other Scandinavian institutions where I held seminars covering much of what is reflected in Chapter 5. That chapter represents a contribution to chaos theory that was carried out in collaboration with J Palmore.
In place of the universal properties of unimodal maps, which are well-treated in the books by Cvitanovic and Schuster, I have instead based my elementary introduction to scaling and universality upon the damped driven pendulum and circle maps, which are of current interest to experimenters at IFE and elsewhere, as is reflected in the literature over the past year. Also, the circle map has not been so well-treated pedagogically in available texts. The discussion in Chapter 3 is not advanced, but it should prepare the reader for a better appreciation of the literature in that field. I should say that these lectures for the most part were written for students, for experimenters, and for curious theorists from other fields in physics, but not for the experts in nonlinear dynamics. For example, Chapter 3 ends where the hardest work begins.
Tn preparing the lectures, I drew heavily upon the books by Arnol'd, Jorna, Jordan and Smith, Lichtenberg and Lieberman, and Schuster, and upon numerous journal articles. The level of the lectures is that of a second year graduate course at the University of Houston, but beginning with undergraduate-level topics in ordinary differential equations. Throughout, I have emphasized my interest in the connection of nonlinear dynamics to statistical mechanics, as well as my interest in "computer arithmetic". I hope that the reader will also find these subjects to be of interest since they have provided me with a great deal of intellectual enjoyment.
My free-half-year at IFE would have been impossible without the aid and moral support provided by Tormod Riste. Gerd Jarrett helped and befriended me and my family in more ways than I should wish to count, and the entire physics staff at IFE, E Andersen, A F Andresen, G Jarrett, K Otnes, T Riste, A Skjeltorp and O. Steinsvoll helped to slake my heavy thirst for Norwegian history and culture, and agreed from the start to speak Norwegian to me daily in order to help me in my effort to learn to speak that language. Gerd Jarrett performed above and beyond the call of duty by tirelessly typing the original lecture notes, which appear as the internal report IFE/I-86/003 + KGF. I also owe thanks to Lynn Smith for typing the revisions that yielded this final version at the University of Houston. I willingly thank J Fröyland, J Palmore and F Ravndal for several helpful discussions and comments, and M Golubitsky, J Palmore, D Schiller and O Steinsvoll for proof-reading several of the chapters (blame for remaining errors is entirely my own, however). I also wish to thank P Alström, E Aurell, T Bohr, P Cvitanovic, E H Hauge, P C Hemmer, J Hertz, J Ketoja, T Kohonen, J Kurkijärvi, K Lindgren, J Myrheim, R Ritala and S Stenholm for interesting discussions during my journeys to other Scandinavian institutions. I am especially grateful to J Fröyland for guestfriendship at the University of Oslo, and to A K M F Hussain for encouraging in 1984 that I should put my lecture notes into print.
Finally, my academic free-year was supported financially by the American Scandinavian Foundation, NORDITA and the University of Houston. All my travel costs within Scandinavia were paid by NORDITA