ASSIGNMENT

Assignment

Assignment

1. What is an attractor in a dynamical system? Provide an example of an attractor in a mental system and an example of an attractor in a social system.

Attractor An attractor is a trajectory of a dynamical system such that initial conditions nearby it will tend toward it in forward time. Often called a stable attractor but this is redundant.

Attractors are parts of the phase space of the dynamical system. Until the 1960s, as evidenced by textbooks of that era, attractors were thought of as being geometrical subsets of the phase space: points, lines, surfaces, volumes. The (topologically) wild sets that had been observed were thought to be fragile anomalies. Stephen Smale was able to show that his horseshoe map was robust and that its attractor had the structure of a Cantor set. Two simple attractors are the fixed point and the limit cycle. (Kellett, Peter M. 2007)

Weakly attracting fixed point for complex quadratic polynomial. fixed point is a point of a function that does not change under some transformation. If we regard the evolution of a dynamical system as a series of transformations, then there may or may not be a point which remains fixed under the whole series of transformation. In general there would not be such a point, but there may be one. The final state that a dynamical system evolves towards, such as the final states of a falling pebble, a damped pendulum, or the water in a glass corresponds to a fixed point of the evolution function, and will occur at the attractor, but the two concepts are not equivalent. A marble rolling around in a basin may have a fixed point in phase space even if it doesn't in physical space. Once it has lost momentum and settled into the bottom of the bowl it then has a fixed point in physical space, phase space, and is located at the attractor for that system.

A limit cycle is a periodic orbit of the system that is isolated. Examples include the swings of a pendulum clock, the tuning circuit of a radio, and the heartbeat while resting. The ideal pendulum is not an example because its orbits are not isolated. In phase space of the ideal pendulum, near any point of a periodic orbit there is another point that belongs to a different periodic orbit. (Kellett, Peter M. 2007)

There may be more than one frequency in the periodic trajectory of the system through the state of a limit cycle. If two of these frequencies form an irrational fraction (i.e. they are incommensurate), the trajectory is no longer closed, and the limit cycle becomes a limit torus. We call this kind of attractor Nt-torus if there are Nt incommensurate frequencies. For example here is a 2-torus: A time series corresponding to this attractor is a quasiperiodic series: A discretely sampled sum of Nt periodic functions (not necessarily sine waves) with incommensurate frequencies. Such a time series does not have a strict periodicity, but its power spectrum still ...