The years that have passed since the publication of the first edition of this book proved that the basic principles used to select and present the material made sense. The idea was to write a simple text that could serve as a seri­ ous introduction to the subject. Of course, the meaning of "simplicity" varies from person to person and from country to country. The word "introduction" contains even more ambiguity. To start reading this book, only a moder­ ate knowledge of linear algebra and calculus is required. Other preliminaries, qualified as "elementary" in modern mathematics, are explicitly formulated in the book. These include the Fredholm Alternative for linear systems and the multidimensional Implicit Function Theorem. Using these very limited tools, a framewo:k of notions, results, and methods is gradually built that allows one to read (and possibly write) scientific papers on bifurcations of nonlinear dynamical systems. Among other things, progress in the sciences means that mathematical results and methods that once were new become standard and routinely used by the research and development community. Hopefully, this edition of the book will contribute to this process. The book's structure has been kept intact. Most of the changes introduced reflect recent theoretical and software developments in which the author was involved. Important changes in the third edition can be summarized as follows. A new section devoted to the fold-flip bifurcation for maps has appeared in Chapter 9.

From Reviews of the First Edition: "I know of no other book that so clearly explains the basic phenomena of bifurcation theory." -Mathematical Reviews

1 Introduction to Dynamical Systems.- 2 Topological Equivalence, Bifurcations, and Structural Stability of Dynamical Systems.- 3 One-Parameter Bifurcations of Equilibria in Continuous-Time Dynamical Systems.- 4 One-Parameter Bifurcations of Fixed Points in Discrete-Time Dynamical Systems.- 5 Bifurcations of Equilibria and Periodic Orbits in n-Dimensional Dynamical Systems.- 6 Bifurcations of Orbits Homoclinic and Heteroclinic to Hyperbolic Equilibria.- 7 Other One-Parameter Bifurcations in Continuous-Time Dynamical Systems.- 8 Two-Parameter Bifurcations of Equilibria in Continuous-Time Dynamical Systems.- 9 Two-Parameter Bifurcations of Fixed Points in Discrete-Time Dynamical Systems.- 10 Numerical Analysis of Bifurcations.- A Basic Notions from Algebra, Analysis, and Geometry.- A.1 Algebra.- A.1.1 Matrices.- A.1.2 Vector spaces and linear transformations.- A.1.3 Eigenvectors and eigenvalues.- A.1.4 Invariant subspaces, generalized eigenvectors, and Jordan normal form.- A.1.5 FredholmAlternative Theorem.- A.1.6 Groups.- A.2 Analysis.- A.2.1 Implicit and Inverse Function Theorems.- A.2.2 Taylor expansion.- A.2.3 Metric, normed, and other spaces.- A.3 Geometry.- A.3.1 Sets.- A.3.2 Maps.- A.3.3 Manifolds.- References.