Introduction

Abstract

The term chaos as used here refers to the seemingly unpredictable behaviour exhibited by deterministic models. A deterministic model is a mathematical model or equation containing no element of chance. Chaos can only be exhibited by nonlinear systems. Roughly speaking, a nonlinear system is said to be chaotic if it exhibits sensitive dependence on initial conditions and has an infinite number of different periodic responses. If, for a system, the state space trajectories originating from two closely spaced initial conditions diverge exponentially, locally speaking, then we say the system exhibits sensitive dependence on initial conditions.