Chapter 2
An Analytic Proof for the Sensitivity of Chaos
to Initial Condition and Perturbations
J.H. Peng and J.S. Tang
Abstract An analytic method to prove the sensitivity of chaotic motion to initial
states and perturbations is proposed in this paper. With the fundamental perturbation
method, a second order nonlinear differential equation is expanded into a series of
perturbation equations, and by means of variation of constants, the general solutions
of the perturbation equations are obtained. Based on these general solutions, we
prove that the chaotic motion is sensitively dependent on the initial conditions and
perturbations.
2.1 Introduction
Since Lorentz discovered the chaotic motion of air flow in his famous article
“Deterministic nonperiodic flow” [1] and Li and Yorke first introduced the term
chaos [2], considerable efforts, both theoretical and experimental, have been de-
voted to the study of chaotic motion of nonlinear dynamical system. Many important
properties and applications of chaos have been obtained [3–12].
The property that chaotic motion is sensitively dependent on initial conditions is
the most important nature of chaos [13]. With numeric computation technique the
property of various chaotic systems has been checked [1, 2] and by means with the
Lyapunov characteristic exponents, it can be verified quantitatively [14,15]. But all
these methods are numerical ones and we have not analytically proved the property
of chaotic motion being sensitively dependent on the initial conditions still. In this
paper, we propose an analytical proof for the property. Firstly, we expand the second
nonlinear differentiate equation into a series perturbation equations, then, with the
trial and error procedure and variation of constants method, we derive the general
J.H. Peng (
)
Department of Mechanical Engineering, Shaoyang Polytechnic, Hunan,
People’s Republic of China
and
Department of Physics, Shaoyang University, Shaoyang, Hunan, People’s Republic of China
e-mail: pengjhua@sina.com
A.C.J. Luo (ed.), Dynamical Systems: Discontinuity, Stochasticity and Time-Delay,
DOI 10.1007/978-1-4419-5754-2
2,
c
Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2010
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