Topics in Dynamical Systems

In this thesis I explore three new topics in Dynamical Systems. In Chapters 2 and 3 I investigate the dynamics of a family of asynchronous linear systems. These sys- tems are of interest as models for asynchronous processes in economics and computer science and as novel ways to solve linear equations. I find a tight sandwich of bounds relating the Lyapunov exponents of these asynchronous systems to the eigenvalue of their synchronous counterparts. Using ideas from the theory of IFSs I show how the random behavior of these systems can be quickly sampled and go some way to characterizing the associated probability measures. In Chapter 4 I consider another family of random linear dynamical system but this time over the Max-plus semi-ring. These models provide a linear way to model essentially non-linear queueing systems. I show how the topology of the queue net- work impacts on the dynamics, in particular I relate an eigenvalue of the adjacency matrix to the throughput of the queue. In Chapter 5 I consider non-smooth systems which can be used to model a wide variety of physical systems in engineering as well as systems in control and computer science. I introduce the Moving Average Transformation which allows us to systematically �smooth� these systems enabling us to apply standard techniques that rely on some smoothness, for example computing Lyapunov exponents from time series data