Syllabus for CAAM 469
Lab for Dynamical Systems: Math 468
Instructor: Brad Peercy

Lab 1 - Linear Systems of ODE

Lab 2 - Intro. to Nonlinear ODEs

Lab 3 - Subspaces and Manifolds

Lab 4 - Slow Manifolds

Lab 5 - Center Manifold

Lab 6 - Bifurcation I

Lab 6.5 - To the Hopf Bifurcation

Lab 7 - Excitable Systems and the Hopf Bifurcation

Lab 8 - Pancreatic Beta Cell

Lab 9 - Scalar Maps

Lab 10 - Scalar Maps with Parameters

Lab 11 - APD Maps

Lab 12 - Delay Differential Equations (Logistic Equation)


Class: 4:00-5:00p.m. TTh, Symonds I (2nd floor Fondren)
Office: DH 3023
Email: bpeercy@caam.rice.edu
Phone: 713-348-6113 (office)
Office hours: Th 10-12 and by appointment
Class web page: http://www.caam.rice.edu/~bpeercy/math468/syllabus.html

Motivation: The point of the dynamical systems lab is to enhance the theory seen in the lecture portion of the course with concrete, hands-on examples of ordinary differential equations (ODEs). In doing so, we will examine several types of physical systems which lend themselves to modeling by ODEs. We will likely concentrate on low-dimensional models as to be able to visualize their dynamics in a phase plane (Matlab's pplane5), however, we will use the power of Matlab to compute and visualize aspects of higher dimensional systems, as well.

Examples will come primarily from biology as predator-prey interactions, cell membrane electrophysiology and networks of excitable cells, cell regulatory networks, population models, among other examples. We will discuss ODE systems which come from discretization of spatial operators and from the wave approximation.


Lab Evaluation: You will be given a weekly lecture/tutorial and assignment due the following week. These will comprise the lab portion of your course grade. For graduate students the write-up of assignments should be done using the appropriate word processor (i.e. LaTeX, etc.) to be used for thesis writing. The write-up should include an appropriate amount of english to convey to the reader the set-up, relevance of included figures, and a conclusion.

Lectures/Tutorials will be given on Tuesdays and the assignments may be completed on Thursdays or outside of the lab.

Texts:
Differential equations and dynamical systems, Perko, 2001
Dynamics and Bifurcations, Hale and Kocak, 1991
Nonlinear Oscillations, Dynamical Systems, and Bifurcations of Vector Fields, Guckenheimer and Holmes, 1983
Computational Biology, Fall, Marland, Wagner, and Tyson, 2002
Mathematical Physiology, Keener and Sneyd, 1998