Chaos and Complex Systems Seminar

Clint Sprott, UW Department of Physics, discusses attractors in nonlinear dynamical systems, including the presence of more than one stable equilibrium or hidden attractors that cannot be found by starting from the vicinity of an unstable equilibrium. Such hidden attractors can be catastrophic if the system is a building, a bridge, or an airplane wing. Examples of such behavior will be illustrated in very simple systems of differential equations and with simple demonstrations.