Preface

Summary

Writing this book was a long-term project that has taken several years, and at the early stages Anatole Katok's participation was crucial. He provided us with the text of his unpublished notes with Leonardo Mendoza that served as the basis for the first draft of Chapters 1–5 and parts of Chapters 6–7. He also fully participated in designing the content of the book in its present form.

In this book we present a self-contained and sufficiently complete description of the modern nonuniform hyperbolicity theory, that is, the theory of dynamical systems whose Lyapunov exponents are not zero. The reader will find all the core results of the theory as well as a good account of its recent developments.

The nonuniform hyperbolicity theory is rich in wonderful ideas and sophisticated techniques, which are widely used in many areas of dynamical systems as well as other areas of mathematics and beyond. The nonuniform hyperbolicity theory is very popular and finds a lot of applications outside mathematics – in physics, biology, engineering, and so on.

Despite (or should we say because of) a tremendous amount of research on the subject, there have been relatively few attempts to summarize and unify the results of the theory in a single manuscript or a survey (see the books [110, 139, 179], the surveys [18, 173, 175], and the lectures [19, 27]). This book is meant to cover this gap. It can be used as a reference book for the theory or as a supporting material for an advanced course on dynamical systems.