Isolated Invariant Sets and the Morse Index

Book excerpt: This volume contains lectures from the Conference Board of Mathematical Sciences meeting held at the University of Colorado on May 31-June 4, 1976. The lectures consist of an expository discussion of basic results for topological flows and a somewhat more detailed discussion of isolated invariant sets and continuation. The construction of the index for isolated invariant sets is new and allows more general application than previous ones. Also, the index itself is endowed with more structure and the continuation theorem is modified to take this new structure into account. Some elementary applications are given, but the main emphasis is on the abstract theory.