Manfred R. Schroeder
Univ. of Gottingen, Gottingen, Germany
AT&T Bell Labs., Murray Hill, NJ 07974
Nonlinear dynamic systems often show sensitive dependence on initial conditions leading to unpredicable behavior with eponentially growing uncertainty. Despite the perfect determinism of the underlying physical laws, such systems are characterized by chaotic behavior, called deterministic chaos. Chaos is encountered in many nonlinear systems from the double pendulum to the three-body problem. The malfunction of the vocal chords and turbulence in wind instruments are examples of acoustic chaos. This paper is intended as an introduction to chaos, its control, and the related concepts of fractals and self-similarity [M. Schroeder, Fractals, Chaos, Power Laws: Minutes from an Infinite Paradise (Freeman, New York, 1991)].