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Catastrophe Theory
In mathematics, catastrophe theory is a branch of bifurcation theory in the study of dynamical systems; it is also a particular special case of more general singularity theory in geometry. Bifurcation theory studies and classifies phenomena characterized by sudden shifts in behavior arising from small changes in circumstances, analysing how the qualitative nature of equation solutions depends on the parameters that appear in the equation. This may lead to sudden and dramatic changes, for example the unpredictable timing and magnitude of a landslide. Catastrophe theory originated with the work of the French mathematician René Thom in the 1960s, and became very popular due to the efforts of Christopher Zeeman in the 1970s. It considers the special case where the long-run stable equilibrium can be identified as the minimum of a smooth, well-defined potential function (Lyapunov function). Small changes in certain parameters of a nonlinear system can cause equilibria to appear or ...
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Mathematics
Mathematics is a field of study that discovers and organizes methods, Mathematical theory, theories and theorems that are developed and Mathematical proof, proved for the needs of empirical sciences and mathematics itself. There are many areas of mathematics, which include number theory (the study of numbers), algebra (the study of formulas and related structures), geometry (the study of shapes and spaces that contain them), Mathematical analysis, analysis (the study of continuous changes), and set theory (presently used as a foundation for all mathematics). Mathematics involves the description and manipulation of mathematical object, abstract objects that consist of either abstraction (mathematics), abstractions from nature orin modern mathematicspurely abstract entities that are stipulated to have certain properties, called axioms. Mathematics uses pure reason to proof (mathematics), prove properties of objects, a ''proof'' consisting of a succession of applications of in ...
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Structural Stability
In mathematics, structural stability is a fundamental property of a dynamical system which means that the qualitative behavior of the trajectories is unaffected by small perturbations (to be exact ''C''1-small perturbations). Examples of such qualitative properties are numbers of fixed points and periodic orbits (but not their periods). Unlike Lyapunov stability, which considers perturbations of initial conditions for a fixed system, structural stability deals with perturbations of the system itself. Variants of this notion apply to systems of ordinary differential equations, vector fields on smooth manifolds and flows generated by them, and diffeomorphisms. Structurally stable systems were introduced by Aleksandr Andronov and Lev Pontryagin in 1937 under the name "systèmes grossiers", or rough systems. They announced a characterization of rough systems in the plane, the Andronov–Pontryagin criterion. In this case, structurally stable systems are ''typical'', they form an ...
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Outer Sphere Electron Transfer
Outer sphere refers to an electron transfer (ET) event that occurs between chemical species that remain separate and intact before, during, and after the ET event. In contrast, for inner sphere electron transfer the participating redox sites undergoing ET become connected by a chemical bridge. Because the ET in outer sphere electron transfer occurs between two non-connected species, the electron is forced to move through space from one redox center to the other. Marcus theory The main theory describing the rates of outer sphere electron transfer was developed by Rudolph A. Marcus in the 1950s, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1992. A major aspect of Marcus theory is the dependence of the electron transfer rate on the thermodynamic driving force (difference in the redox potentials of the electron-exchanging sites). For most reactions, the rates increase with increased driving force. A second aspect is that the rate of outer sphere electron-transfer depends ...
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Structural Fracture Mechanics
Structural fracture mechanics is the field of structural engineering concerned with the study of load-carrying structures that includes one or several failed or damaged components. It uses methods of analytical solid mechanics, structural engineering, safety engineering, probability theory, and catastrophe theory to calculate the load and stress in the structural components and analyze the safety of a damaged structure. There is a direct analogy between fracture mechanics of solid and structural fracture mechanics: There are different causes of the first component failure: # mechanical overload, fatigue (material), unpredicted scenario, etc. # “human intervention” like unprofessional behavior or a terrorist attack. There are two typical scenarios: #A localized failure does NOT cause immediate collapse of the entire structure. #The entire structure fails immediately after one of its components fails. If the structure does not collapse immediately there is a limited ...
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Complex System
A complex system is a system composed of many components that may interact with one another. Examples of complex systems are Earth's global climate, organisms, the human brain, infrastructure such as power grid, transportation or communication systems, complex software and electronic systems, social and economic organizations (like cities), an ecosystem, a living Cell (biology), cell, and, ultimately, for some authors, the entire universe. The behavior of a complex system is intrinsically difficult to model due to the dependencies, competitions, relationships, and other types of interactions between their parts or between a given system and its environment. Systems that are "Complexity, complex" have distinct properties that arise from these relationships, such as Nonlinear system, nonlinearity, emergence, spontaneous order, Complex adaptive system, adaptation, and Feedback, feedback loops, among others. Because such systems appear in a wide variety of fields, the commonalities am ...
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Scientific American
''Scientific American'', informally abbreviated ''SciAm'' or sometimes ''SA'', is an American popular science magazine. Many scientists, including Albert Einstein and Nikola Tesla, have contributed articles to it, with more than 150 Nobel Prize-winners being featured since its inception. In print since 1845, it is the oldest continuously published magazine in the United States. ''Scientific American'' is owned by Springer Nature, which is a subsidiary of Holtzbrinck Publishing Group. History ''Scientific American'' was founded by inventor and publisher Rufus Porter (painter), Rufus Porter in 1845 as a four-page weekly newspaper. The first issue of the large-format New York City newspaper was released on August 28, 1845. Throughout its early years, much emphasis was placed on reports of what was going on at the United States Patent and Trademark Office, U.S. Patent Office. It also reported on a broad range of inventions including perpetual motion machines, an 1860 devi ...
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Spontaneous Symmetry Breaking
Spontaneous symmetry breaking is a spontaneous process of symmetry breaking, by which a physical system in a symmetric state spontaneously ends up in an asymmetric state. In particular, it can describe systems where the equations of motion or the Lagrangian obey symmetries, but the lowest-energy vacuum solutions do not exhibit that same symmetry. When the system goes to one of those vacuum solutions, the symmetry is broken for perturbations around that vacuum even though the entire Lagrangian retains that symmetry. Overview The spontaneous symmetry breaking cannot happen in quantum mechanics that describes finite dimensional systems, due to Stone-von Neumann theorem (that states the uniqueness of Heisenberg commutation relations in finite dimensions). So spontaneous symmetry breaking can be observed only in infinite dimensional theories, as quantum field theories. By definition, spontaneous symmetry breaking requires the existence of physical laws which are invariant ...
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Pitchfork Bifurcation
In bifurcation theory, a field within mathematics, a pitchfork bifurcation is a particular type of local bifurcation theory, bifurcation where the system transitions from one fixed point to three fixed points. Pitchfork bifurcations, like Hopf bifurcations, have two types – supercritical and subcritical. In continuous dynamical systems described by Ordinary differential equation, ODEs—i.e. flows—pitchfork bifurcations occur generically in systems with symmetry in mathematics, symmetry. Supercritical case The normal form (bifurcation theory), normal form of the supercritical pitchfork bifurcation is : \frac=rx-x^3. For r0 there is an unstable equilibrium at x = 0, and two stable equilibria at x = \pm\sqrt. Subcritical case The normal form (bifurcation theory), normal form for the subcritical case is : \frac=rx+x^3. In this case, for r0 the equilibrium at x=0 is unstable. Formal definition An ODE : \dot=f(x,r)\, described by a one parameter function f(x, r) wit ...
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Hysteresis
Hysteresis is the dependence of the state of a system on its history. For example, a magnet may have more than one possible magnetic moment in a given magnetic field, depending on how the field changed in the past. Plots of a single component of the moment often form a loop or hysteresis curve, where there are different values of one variable depending on the direction of change of another variable. This history dependence is the basis of memory in a hard disk drive and the remanence that retains a record of the Earth's magnetic field magnitude in the past. Hysteresis occurs in ferromagnetic and ferroelectricity, ferroelectric materials, as well as in the deformation (mechanics), deformation of rubber bands and shape-memory alloys and many other natural phenomena. In natural systems, it is often associated with irreversible process, irreversible thermodynamic change such as phase transitions and with internal friction; and dissipation is a common side effect. Hysteresis can be fou ...
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Cusp Catastrophe Animation Gif
A cusp is the most pointed end of a curve. It often refers to cusp (anatomy), a pointed structure on a tooth. Cusp or CUSP may also refer to: Mathematics * Cusp (singularity), a singular point of a curve * Cusp catastrophe, a branch of bifurcation theory in the study of dynamical systems * Cusp form, in modular form theory * Cusp neighborhood, a set of points near a cusp * Cuspidal representation, a generalization of cusp forms in the theory of automorphic representations Science and medicine * Beach cusps, a pointed and regular arc pattern of the shoreline at the beach * Behavioral cusp, a change in behavior with far-reaching consequences * Caltech-USGS Seismic Processing, software for analyzing earthquake data * Center for Urban Science and Progress, a graduate school of New York University focusing on urban informatics * CubeSat for Solar Particles, a satellite launched in 2022 * Cusp (anatomy), a pointed structure on a tooth * Cusps of heart valves, leaflets of a hea ...
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Tipping Point (physics)
Hysteresis is the dependence of the state of a system on its history. For example, a magnet may have more than one possible magnetic moment in a given magnetic field, depending on how the field changed in the past. Plots of a single component of the moment often form a loop or hysteresis curve, where there are different values of one variable depending on the direction of change of another variable. This history dependence is the basis of memory in a hard disk drive and the remanence that retains a record of the Earth's magnetic field magnitude in the past. Hysteresis occurs in ferromagnetic and ferroelectric materials, as well as in the deformation of rubber bands and shape-memory alloys and many other natural phenomena. In natural systems, it is often associated with irreversible thermodynamic change such as phase transitions and with internal friction; and dissipation is a common side effect. Hysteresis can be found in physics, chemistry, engineering, biology, and economics. ...
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Fold Bifurcation
In the mathematical area of bifurcation theory a saddle-node bifurcation, tangential bifurcation or fold bifurcation is a local bifurcation in which two fixed points (or equilibria) of a dynamical system collide and annihilate each other. The term 'saddle-node bifurcation' is most often used in reference to continuous dynamical systems. In discrete dynamical systems, the same bifurcation is often instead called a fold bifurcation. Another name is blue sky bifurcation in reference to the sudden creation of two fixed points. If the phase space is one-dimensional, one of the equilibrium points is unstable (the saddle), while the other is stable (the node). Saddle-node bifurcations may be associated with hysteresis loops and catastrophes. Normal form A typical example of a differential equation with a saddle-node bifurcation is: :\frac=r+x^2. Here x is the state variable and r is the bifurcation parameter. *If r0 there are no equilibrium points. In fact, this is a normal ...
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