24 Apr 2001

Einar Mjølhus "Variations of Pendulums".

The contribution will be mainly tutorial. I shall show some ideas taught in my course "Dynamical systems", and also some ideas just beyond that course, exemplified by some variations of pendulums. I wish to end up with the formulation of a problem to which I do not know the answer (though, I am not saying that the answer is not known). Keywords: Parametric resonance, perturbation methods (in particular averaging method), Hamiltonian systems, canonical transformations, stability, structural stability, and KAM theory.