Scientific heritage of L. P. Shilnikov (Q2513980)

This is the first part in a series of papers reviewing research of Professor Shilnikov, a renown expert in the theory of dynamical systems. Shilnikov's work laid foundations to the modern theory of global bifurcations of high-dimensional systems and dynamical chaos; the authors arranged his papers in seven groups in accordance with major directions of research. The paper under review deals with Shilnikov's contribution to the first two topics, (i) bifurcation of homoclinic loops and (ii) homoclinic saddle-focus and spiral chaos. The paper starts with the presentation of Shilnikov's foundational result on the birth of a stable periodic orbit from a saddle-node equilibrium. Further research of Shilnikov and his collaborators in this direction led to several important discoveries, including abrupt transition from quasi-periodicity to chaos and the blue sky catastrophe. Other fundamental results on the bifurcation of periodic orbits obtained by Professor Shilnikov and reviewed in the first part of this paper are concerned with the birth of a stable periodic orbit from a homoclinic loop to a saddle equilibrium with a negative saddle value, the birth of a saddle periodic orbit from a homoclinic loop to a saddle equilibrium, and the birth of saddle periodic orbits from saddle-saddle equilibria. The continuation of this line of research led to the discovery of infinitely many saddle periodic orbits in any arbitrarily small neighborhood of a homoclinic loop to a saddle-focus, a new phenomenon characterized by the fact that periodic orbits exist simultaneously with the separatrix loop rather than emerge from it. The authors point out that ``Shilnikov understood very well the significance of his discovery. At that time the theory of dynamical systems lacked the language to properly describe such phenomena; necessary methods were not developed either. In general, dynamics of non-planar systems was somewhat of a mystery.'' Commenting on Shilnikov's further efforts to describe chaotic dynamics, the authors emphasize that ``the importance of the homoclinic tangencies is that their existence implies the complexity of dynamics, full details of which are ... beyond a human comprehension.'' In the final part of the paper, discussing Professor Shilnikov's research on the routes to spiral chaos, the authors indicate that ``he found that whenever a system, depending on some bifurcation parameter, evolves from a stable (``laminar'') to a chaotic (``turbulent'') regime, then the transition is naturally accompanied with the formation of a saddle-focus equilibrium in the phase space. Furthermore, regardless of a particular route to chaos, it is also natural for the stable and unstable manifolds of this saddle-focus to come sufficiently close to each other, which makes the creation of a homoclinic loop feasible. This idea is hardly mathematically formalizable, it is more of an empirical statement, and this makes it even more valuable. The construction links the beginning of the transition to chaos (through an Andronov-Hopf bifurcation) with the end of it (the formation of a spiral attractor) in a simple and model-independent way.'' The list of references contains eightyfive entries related to the first two directions of Shilnikov's research.