Research on Nonlinear Dynamics began in the late 19th century with Henri Poincaré (1854-1912) who studied the 3-body problem in celestial mechanics, but only on the 20th century that this area had attracted a greater number of researchers. In the early 20th century George D. Birkhoff (1884-1944) expanded the results obtained by Poincaré and after that, the Qualitative Theory of Differential Equations had several advances in the first half of the century, specially with Russian tradition in the study of Dynamical Systems Theory. Between the late 1960s and the beginning of the 1980s, the knowledge that simple dynamical laws could give rise to complex behaviors had configured, at that time, as a scientific revolution behind the name “Chaos”. Scientists like Steve Smale (1930-), David Ruelle (1935-), and Edward Lorenz (1917-2008) have developed pioneering work in this field. In the mid-1970s the study of Complex Systems attracted more and more attention of scientists, and began to fall in the popular domain by means of the popular science writers. While the history of Dynamic Systems as a topic of Mathematics has been well studied the achievements by physicists have been understudied, which is a meaningful lacuna as the physicists had an important role in this period for the establishment of this area of knowledge. As Brazilian science is concerned, the History of Mathematics well records the contributions to this field by Brazilian mathematicians such as Mauricio Peixoto but there are no historical studies about how this theme evolved in Brazilian Physics. By this time, Brazilians physicists went abroad to study this field, some of them, such as Celso Grebogi, achieved scientific prestige among his peers, and most of them returned to Brazil to continue their research. In this paper I would like to show the role played by physicists in the development of nonlinear dynamics taking the case of Brazilian physicists in the period 1970-2000, their formation and their relationship with physicists from other countries. This study was based in interviews and scientometrics analyses. As a conclusion I would like to show that, despite the delay of formation of a brazilian comunity dedicated to the studies of Nonlinear Dynamics, brazilian physicists had been followed the evolution of this area.


We are grateful for the comments on an earlier draft of this communication provided by Olival Freire Junior.

This presentation is based on work co-authored by Suani T. R. Pinho.