Many books on dynamics start with a discussion of systems with one or two degrees of freedom and then turn to the generalization to the case of many degrees of freedom. For linear systems, the concept of eigenfunctions provides a compact and elegant method for decomposing the dynamics of a high dimensional system into a series of independent single-degree-of-freedom dynamical systems. Yet, when the system has a very high dimension, the determination of the eigenfunctions may be a distinct challenge, and when the dynamical system is nonconservative and/or nonlinear, the whole notion of uncoupled eigenmodes requires nontrivial extensions of classical methods. These issues constitute the subject of this book.
