Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Lasalle's Invariance Principle On Measure Chains, Anders Floor '00

Honors Projects

It was in 1892 that Lyapunov published his paper giving his "second method". The basic guiding principle was that we might be able to know something about the stability of the system from the form of the equations describing it. Specifically, the idea was that it would not be necessary to know the solutions of the equations involved. This is of course very useful since in most cases solutions are extremely difficult or even impossible to find. Lyapunov's insight was that if a function could be found with, among other properties, a negative rate of change along the solution of …