Introduction to Nonlinear Dynamics

What is common between the motion of planets, mechanical vibrations, chemical oscillators, biological rhythms and love affairs? They can all be modelled as dynamical systems, and more often than not these systems are nonlinear!

This course is an introduction to nonlinear dynamics.  The style of the lectures will be friendly: we will focus on geometric intuition and examples, rather than on rigorous proofs and abstract algebra. Also, the concepts will be illustrated by application to science and engineering. The theory will be developed systematically. We will cover 1 and 2 dimensional flows, with a focus on stability and bifurcations.