Local bifurcations, center manifolds, and normal forms in infinite-dimensional dynamical systems (Q710339)

The book of Haragus and Iooss gives an extensive overview over the field of local bifurcations, center manifolds and normal forms in infinite dimensions. The authors guide the reader from easy illustrating examples of bifurcations in finite dimensional differential equations at the beginning of the book to more involved applications in partial differential equations. The focus of the book is on local bifurcations for finite and infinite dynamical systems. The theory of local center manifolds and normal forms is explained in detail. In the more technical chapters, proofs are omitted and put into the appendix. This makes the text very readable. The appendix also contains an overview over the functional analysis that is used throughout the book, making the book self-contained. The book is suitable for graduate students and researchers likewise and can be read from beginning to end or used as a reference. The notation used throughout the book is very intuitive and the most important spaces and operators used can be found in the index. However, a list of symbols would have been a good addition for those who do not read from the first to the last page. The book is organized as follows. The first chapter gives illustrating examples of bifurcations in ordinary differential equations in one and two dimensions. These reoccur in the following chapters in examples sections. The second chapter is devoted to local center manifolds, the core tool used throughout the book. After the main theorems are presented (autonomous case, non autonomous case, with symmetries,with parameters) several examples are discussed. Through the use of step-by-step examples and exercises, a number of possible applications are illustrated, allowing the reader less familiar with it to use the center manifold reduction method by checking some clear assumptions. The third chapter presents the normal form theorem for \(C^k\) vector fields in \(\mathbb{R}^n\), discusses examples and generalizations -- again with symmetries and parameters. The fourth chapter exclusively discusses reversible bifurcations and the fifth chapter applies the theory to examples in PDEs like the Couette-Taylor problem, or almost planar waves in reaction diffusion systems. The appendix with proofs follows together with a comprehensive reference section.