Period Three Implies Chaos

Abstract

The way phenomena or processes evolve or change in time is often described by differential equations or difference equations. One of the simplest mathematical situations occurs when the phenomenon can be described by a single number as, for example, when the number of children susceptible to some disease at the beginning of a school year can be estimated purely as a function of the number for the previous year. That is, when the number x _n+1, at the beginning of the n + 1st year (or time period) can be written

$${x_{n + 1}} = F({x_n}),$$

(1.1)

where F maps an interval J into itself. Of course such a model for the year by year progress of the disease would be very simplistic and would contain only a shadow of the more complicated phenomena. For other phenomena this model might be more accurate. This equation has been used successfully to model the distribution of points of impact on a spinning bit for oil well drilling, as mentioned if [8, 11] knowing this distribution is helpful in predicting uneven wear of the bit. For another example, if a population of insects has discrete generations, the size of the n + 1st generation will be a function of the nth. A reasonable model would then be a generalized logistic equation

$${x_{n + 1}} = r{x_n}[1 - {x_n}/K].$$

(1.2)