A Hopf bifurcation theorem for difference equations approximating a differential equation (Q5966238)

If an ordinary differential equation is discretizised near an asymptotically stable stationary solution with a pair of imaginary eigenvalues by Euler's method with constant step length h, small invariant attracting cycles of radius \(O(h^{1/2})\) will appear. This Hopf bifurcation theorem is applied to prove the existence of limit cycles in certain difference equations occuring in biomathematics (hypercycle, two loci-two alleles) and is also extended to general Runge- Kutta methods.