https://DevOpsCloud.io -- Cloud Monk Losang Jinpa, Ph.D., MCSE/MCT, GitOps DevOps Engineer

In mathematics, physics, engineering and systems theory, a dynamical system is the description of how a system evolves in time. We express our observables as numbers and we record them over time.

For example an astronomer can experimentally record the positions of how the planets move in the sky, and this can be considered a complete enough description of a dynamical system. In the case of planets there is also enough knowledge to codify this information as a set of differential equations with initial conditions, or as a map from the present state to a future state in a predefined state space with a time parameter t , or as an orbit in phase space.

The study of dynamical systems is the focus of dynamical systems theory, which has applications to a wide variety of fields such as mathematics, physics, biology, chemistry, engineering, economics, history, and medicine. Dynamical systems are a fundamental part of chaos theory, logistic map dynamics, bifurcation theory, the self-assembly and self-organization processes, and the edge of chaos concept.