Inequivalent topologies of chaos in simple equations (Q813637)

The authors describe the following topological tools for classification of chaotic attractors in three-dimensional systems of ordinary differential equations: (i) branched manifolds or templates and (ii) trapping surfaces that are crossed by trajectories from outside to inside (bounding tori). They study in detail several systems with unimodal first-return maps and systems with multimodal first-return maps for which bounding tori are of genus 1 and 3. A lot of interesting particular examples (basically, first intruduced by the third author) are analyzed.