In last thirty years an explosion of interest in the study of nonlinear dynamical systems occured. The theory of one-dimensional dynamical systems has grown out in many directions. One of them has its roots in the Sharkovski0 Theorem. This beautiful theorem describes the possible sets of periods of all cycles of maps of an interval into itself. Another direction has its main objective in measuring the complexity of a system, or the amount of chaos present in it. A good way of doing this is to compute topological entropy of the system. The aim of this book is to provide graduate students and...

The goal of this monograph is to answer the question, is it possible to solve the dynamics problem inside the configuration space instead of the phase space? By introducing a proper class of vector field – the Cartesian vector field – given in a Riemann space, the authors explore the connections between the first order ordinary differential equations (ODEs) associated to the Cartesian vector field in the configuration space of a given mechanical system and its dynamics. The result is a new perspective for studying the dynamics of mechanical systems, which allows the authors to present new...