These notes are the result of a course in dynamical systems given at Orsay during the 1976-77 academic year. I had given a similar course at the Gradu ate Center of the City University of New York the previous year and came to France equipped with the class notes of two of my students there, Carol Hurwitz and Michael Maller. My goal was to present Smale's n-Stability Theorem as completely and compactly as possible and in such a way that the students would have easy access to the literature. I was not confident that I could do all this in lectures in French, so I decided to distribute lecture...

These notes are the result of a course in dynamical systems given at Orsay during the 1976-77 academic year. I had given a similar course at the Gradu ate Center of the City University of New York the previous year and came to France equipped with the class notes of two of my students there, Carol Hurwitz and Michael Maller. My goal was to present Smale's n-Stability Theorem as completely and compactly as possible and in such a way that the students would have easy access to the literature. I was not confident that I could do all this in lectures in French, so I decided to distribute lecture...