Before the emergence of chaos in electronic circuits during the late 70s and early 80s there is an important contribution by Igor Gumowski & Christian Mira (the “Toulouse Research Group”) whose a short story was given in Ref. [1] Stimulated by a paper by C. P. Pulkin [2] who showed that in one-dimensional noninvertible map infinitely many unstable cycles may lead to bounded complex iterated sequences, Gumowski & Mira studied the piecewise-linear map [3]
For some -values, they obtained attractive limit set made of bounded cloud of points as shown in Fig. 1 (
). This could have been the first now called “chaotic” solution to a piecewise-linear map reported with an explicit picture. By these times, Gumowski & Mira indicated these types of behaviors as “Pulkin phenonmenon”. This is only ten years later that first chaotic solutions were widely investigated in
electronic circuits.
Increasing slightly the value to 2.39, the chaotic solution observed is just before a boundary crisis unifying the two sets of points (Fig. 2).
[1] C. Mira, I. Gumowski and a Toulouse Research Group in the “prehistoric times of chaotic dynamics”, World Scientific Series in Nonlinear Science A, 39, 95-198, 2000.
[2] C. P. Pulkin, Oscillating iterated sequences (in Russian), Dokl. Akad. Nauk. SSSR, 76 (6), 1129-1132, 1950.
[3] I. Gumowski & C. Mira, Sensitivity Problems Related to Certain Bifurcations in Non-Linear Recurrence Relations, Automatica, 5, 303-317, 1969.