Ethan Akin – författare

In the long run of a dynamical system, after transient phenomena have passed away, what remains is recurrence. An orbit is recurrent when it returns repeatedly to each neighborhood of its initial position. We can sharpen the concept by insisting that the returns occur with at least some prescribed frequency. For example, an orbit lies in some minimal subset if and only if it returns almost periodically to each neighborhood of the initial point. That is, each return time set is a so-called syndetic subset ofT= the positive reals (continuous time system) or T = the positive integers (discrete time system). This is a prototype for many of the results in this book. In particular, frequency is measured by membership in a family of subsets of the space modeling time, in this case the family of syndetic subsets of T. In applying dynamics to combinatorial number theory, Furstenberg introduced a large number of such families. Our first task is to describe explicitly the calculus of families implicit in Furstenberg's original work and in the results which have proliferated since. There are general constructions on families, e. g. , the dual of a family and the product of families. Other natural constructions arise from a topology or group action on the underlying set. The foundations are laid, in perhaps tedious detail, in Chapter 2. The family machinery is then applied in Chapters 3 and 4 to describe family versions of recurrence, topological transitivity, distality and rigidity.

Topology, the foundation of modern analysis, arose historically as a way to organize ideas like compactness and connectedness which had emerged from analysis. Similarly, recent work in dynamical systems theory has both highlighted certain topics in the pre-existing subject of topological dynamics (such as the construction of Lyapunov functions and various notions of stability) and also generated new concepts and results (such as attractors, chain recurrence, and basic sets). This book collects these results, both old and new, and organizes them into a natural foundation for all aspects of dynamical systems theory. No existing book is comparable in content or scope. Requiring background in point-set topology and some degree of ""mathematical sophistication"", Akin's book serves as an excellent textbook for a graduate course in dynamical systems theory. In addition, Akin's reorganization of previously scattered results makes this book of interest to mathematicians and other researchers who use dynamical systems in their work.

This groundbreaking volume is the first to elaborate the theory of set families as a tool for studying the phenomenon of recurrence. The theory is implicit in such seminal works as Hillel Furstenberg's Recurrence in Ergodic Theory and Combinational Number Theory, but Ethan Akin's study elaborates it in detail, defining such elements of theory as: open families of special subsets the unification of several ideas associated with transitivity, ergodicity, and mixing the Ellis theory of enveloping semigroups for compact dynamical systems and new notions of equicontinuity, distality, and rigidity.

In the long run of a dynamical system, after transient phenomena have passed away, what remains is recurrence. An orbit is recurrent when it returns repeatedly to each neighborhood of its initial position. We can sharpen the concept by insisting that the returns occur with at least some prescribed frequency. For example, an orbit lies in some minimal subset if and only if it returns almost periodically to each neighborhood of the initial point. That is, each return time set is a so-called syndetic subset ofT= the positive reals (continuous time system) or T = the positive integers (discrete time system). This is a prototype for many of the results in this book. In particular, frequency is measured by membership in a family of subsets of the space modeling time, in this case the family of syndetic subsets of T. In applying dynamics to combinatorial number theory, Furstenberg introduced a large number of such families. Our first task is to describe explicitly the calculus of families implicit in Furstenberg''s original work and in the results which have proliferated since. There are general constructions on families, e. g. , the dual of a family and the product of families. Other natural constructions arise from a topology or group action on the underlying set. The foundations are laid, in perhaps tedious detail, in Chapter 2. The family machinery is then applied in Chapters 3 and 4 to describe family versions of recurrence, topological transitivity, distality and rigidity.

The differential equations which model the action of selection and recombination are nonlinear equations which are impossible to It is even difficult to describe in general the solve explicitly. Recently, Shahshahani began using qualitative behavior of solutions. differential geometry to study these equations [28]. with this mono­ graph I hope to show that his ideas illuminate many aspects of pop­ ulation genetics. Among these are his proof and clarification of Fisher's Fundamental Theorem of Natural Selection and Kimura's Maximum Principle and also the effect of recombination on entropy. We also discover the relationship between two classic measures of 2 genetic distance: the x measure and the arc-cosine measure. There are two large applications. The first is a precise definition of the biological concept of degree of epistasis which applies to general (i.e. frequency dependent) forms of selection. The second is the unexpected appearance of cycling. We show that cycles can occur in the two-locus-two-allele model of selection plus recombination even when the fitness numbers are constant (i.e. no frequency dependence). This work is addressed to two different kinds of readers which accounts for its mode of organization. For the biologist, Chapter I contains a description of the entire work with brief indications of a proof for the harder results. I imagine a reader with some familiarity with linear algebra and systems of differential equations. Ideal background is Hirsch and Smale's text [15].

Mathematical methods have been applied successfully to population genet­ ics for a long time. Even the quite elementary ideas used initially proved amazingly effective. For example, the famous Hardy-Weinberg Law (1908) is basic to many calculations in population genetics. The mathematics in the classical works of Fisher, Haldane and Wright was also not very complicated but was of great help for the theoretical understanding of evolutionary pro­ cesses. More recently, the methods of mathematical genetics have become more sophisticated. In use are probability theory, stochastic processes, non­ linear differential and difference equations and nonassociative algebras. First contacts with topology have been established. Now in addition to the tra­ ditional movement of mathematics for genetics, inspiration is flowing in the opposite direction, yielding mathematics from genetics. The present mono­ grapll reflects to some degree both patterns but especially the latter one. A pioneer of this synthesis was S. N. Bernstein. He raised-and partially solved- -the problem of characterizing all stationary evolutionary operators, and this work was continued by the author in a series of papers (1971-1979). This problem has not been completely solved, but it appears that only cer­ tain operators devoid of any biological significance remain to be addressed. The results of these studies appear in chapters 4 and 5. The necessary alge­ braic preliminaries are described in chapter 3 after some elementary models in chapter 2.