Semester 1 2003
620-341: Dynamical systems and chaos
Lecturer
Dr. Andrew Rechnitzer
Room = 111 Richard Berry Building
Phone = 8344-8862
Email = andrewr at ms dot unimelb dot edu dot au
I will be away from Friday 9 until Thursday 22 May (inclusive)
- I will miss 6 lectures and 2 tutorials.
- Dr Jan de Gier will take the course while I am away.
- The overheads for this portion of the course will become available as the lectures are given.
- They are available through this link (to Jan's web-page)
Java stuff
While I have not finished this page, some useful java applets from
"Exploring
Chaos: Theory and Experiment" by
Brian Davies can be found
here. These applets original come from
this page.
During the course I will (from time to time) make use of some of these.
You maybe expected to make use them for your assignments.
More chaos associated applets can be found here.
A nice fractal generator (that has lots of features) is
JAME, which is free to download
(thoughyou will need some java stuff installed on your machine). The above
pictureswere made with it. After the course you should understand what these
pictures actually mean.
Topics covered
The class will (mostly) follow the book:
"
A First Course in Chaotic Dynamical Systems"
by Bob Devaney. While this is a new
book on chaos which actually has some mathematical content, you
are not expected to buy it for the course.
I will also make use of some material from
"Exploring Chaos: Theory and Experiment". Again, you are not expected to
buy it.
14th April:
there are copies of these two books on the reserve desk in the mathematics library. Enjoy.
I hope to cover all of the following topics (in order?):
- A brief history of dynamics and an introduction to chaos
- Orbits of functions
- Graphical analysis of functions
- Fixed and periodic points
- Bifurcations
- The quadratic family and the logistic function
- The period doubling route to chaos
- Symbolic dynamics
- How to define chaos
- Sarkovskii's theorem
- Fractals
- The Julia set
- The Mandelbrot set
If there is time we may cover some other topics....
Assessment
- 3 hour final exam.
- 2 assignments
- Final mark will be maximum of (100% exam) and (85% exam + 15% assignments)
Contact times and places
- 36 lectures:
- Tuesday 10:00am - 11:00am Russell Love Theatre
- Wednesday 1:15pm - 2:15pm Russell Love Theatre
- Thursday 11:00am - 12:00pm Russell Love Theatre
- 12 practice classes:
- Tuesday 12:00pm - 1:00pm Old Geology Theatre
- consultation hours:
- Just come and see me in my office on Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday.
Class representative on the SSLC
- Anna Phan
If you wish to contact her with comments about the course, you may do so by email:
attp at rocketmail dot com
Generic Skills
During the course you will have the opportunity to acquire some
generic skills.
Handouts and other bits and pieces
Disclaimer