The Theory of Chaotic Attractors

The editors felt that the time was right for a book on an important topic, the history and development of the notions of chaotic attractors and their "natu­ ral" invariant measures. We wanted to bring together a coherent collection of readable, interesting, outstanding papers for detailed study and comparison. We hope that this book will allow serious graduate students to hold seminars to study how the research in this field developed. Limitation of space forced us painfully to exclude many excellent, relevant papers, and the resulting choice reflects the interests of the editors. Since James Alan Yorke was born August 3, 1941, we chose to have this book commemorate his sixtieth birthday, honoring his research in this field. The editors are four of his collaborators. We would particularly like to thank Achi Dosanjh (senior editor math­ ematics), Elizabeth Young (assistant editor mathematics), Joel Ariaratnam (mathematics editorial), and Yong-Soon Hwang (book production editor) from Springer Verlag in New York for their efforts in publishing this book.

 

The development of the theory of chaotic dynamics and its subsequent wide applicability in science and technology has been an extremely important achievement of modern mathematics. This volume collects several of the most influential papers in chaos theory from the past 40 years, starting with Lorenz's seminal 1963 article and containing classic papers by Lasota and Yorke (1973), Bowen and Ruelle (1975), Li and Yorke (1975), May (1976), Henon (1976), Milnor (1985), Eckmann and Ruelle (1985), Grebogi, Ott, and Yorke (1988), Benedicks and Young (1993) and many others, with an emphasis on invariant measures for chaotic systems.

Dedicated to Professor James Yorke, a pioneer in the field and a recipient of the 2003 Japan Prize, the book includes an extensive, anecdotal introduction discussing Yorke's contributions and giving readers a general overview of the key developments of the theory from a historical perspective.