Recipes for Continuation

Book excerpt: This book provides a comprehensive introduction to the mathematical methodology of parameter continuation, the computational analysis of families of solutions to nonlinear mathematical equations. It develops a systematic formalism for constructing abstract representations of continuation problems and for implementing these in an existing computational platform. Recipes for Continuation lends equal importance to theoretical rigor, algorithm development, and software engineering; demonstrates the use of fully developed toolbox templates for single- and multisegment boundary-value problems to the analysis of periodic orbits in smooth and hybrid dynamical systems, quasi-periodic invariant tori, and homoclinic and heteroclinic connecting orbits between equilibria and/or periodic orbits; shows the use of vectorization for optimal computational efficiency, an object-oriented paradigm for the modular construction of continuation problems, and adaptive discretization algorithms for guaranteed bounds on estimated errors; and contains extensive and fully worked examples that illustrate the application of the MATLAB®-based Computational Continuation Core (COCO) to problems from recent research literature that are relevant to dynamical system models from mechanics, electronics, biology, economics, and neuroscience.