The Features of Chaos
In this chapter we introduce the features of Chaotic systems. We describe “sensitivity to initial conditions” and its quantitative measure, the Lyapunov exponent, which reflect the average rate of divergence (if any) between two neighboring trajectories. We describe the dynamic “strangeness” of the system. Which has its counterpart in the “strangeness” of the attractor's geometry and concerns with the texture woven by the system in phase space. Fractal dimensions are measures of such strange geometries and they are here described. The concept of recurrence is introduced and the recurrence plot is described, and code provided to generate it. The correlation dimension is addressed and the R code to compute is listed and detailed. Poincare map is introduced and applied to the study of the damped, driven pendulum.