ABOUT THE BOOK AUTHORS
Ralph Abraham is Professor of Mathematics at the University
of California at Santa Cruz, founder of the graduate program there
on computational dynamics, and is an author of
- Foundations of Mechanics,
- Manifolds, Tensor Analysis, and Applications, and
- Dynamics, the Geometry of Behavior.
Laura Gardini is Professor of Mathematics in the Universities of
Urbino and Brescia in Italy, and is an author of
- Chaotic Dynamics: Two-Dimensional Endomorphisms.
Christian Mira is
Professor of Control Engineering at the Institut National des Sciences
Appliquees de Toulouse, where he created the
Groupe d'Etudes des Systemes Non Lineaires et Applications (GESNLA),
in the Laboratoire des Systemes Informatiques et
Automatiques (LESIA). He is an author of
- Dynamique chaotique:
transformations ponctuelles, transition ordre-desordre,
- Recurrences and discrete dynamic systems,
- Chaotic Dynamics, and
- Chaotic Dynamics: Two-Dimensional Endomorphisms.
As the creator of the method of critical curves, Christian Mira
brings to this book long and extensive experience in the field. Laura
Gardini extended the method of critical curves and applied it
extensively, recently obtaining many new results. Ralph Abraham,
known for his pioneering work (and his extensive book writing
and illustrating) on continuous dynamical systems since 1960,
met Mira and Gardini at a conference in June, 1991, and quickly
became their co-author in this work.
Revised 30 September 1996 by Ralph Abraham,
<abraham@vismath.org>