Three Conditions Lyapunov Exponents Should Satisfy
In contrast to the unilateral claim in some papers that a positive Lyapunov exponent means chaos, it was claimed in this paper that this is just one of the three conditions that Lyapunov exponent should satisfy in a dissipative dynamical system when the chaotic motion appears. The other two conditions, any continuous dynamical system without a fixed point has at least one zero exponent, and any dissipative dynamical system has at least one negative exponent and the sum of all of the 1-dimensional Lyapunov exponents id negative, are also discussed. In order to verify the conclusion, a MATLAB scheme was developed for the computation of the 1-dimensional and 3-dimensional Lyapunov exponents of the Duffing system with square and cubic nonlinearity.