Dynamics Beyond Uniform Hyperbolicity

Book excerpt: What is Dynamics about? In broad terms, the goal of Dynamics is to describe the long term evolution of systems for which an "infinitesimal" evolution rule is known. Examples and applications arise from all branches of science and technology, like physics, chemistry, economics, ecology, communications, biology, computer science, or meteorology, to mention just a few. These systems have in common the fact that each possible state may be described by a finite (or infinite) number of observable quantities, like position, velocity, temperature, concentration, population density, and the like. Thus, m the space of states (phase space) is a subset M of an Euclidean space M . Usually, there are some constraints between these quantities: for instance, for ideal gases pressure times volume must be proportional to temperature. Then the space M is often a manifold, an n-dimensional surface for some n