Michael Field.

Geometric methods in bifurcation theory



These notes are intended to provide an introduction to the geometric analysis of symmetry breaking for compact Lie groups. The concept of a branching pattern is discussed and a number of stability and genericity theorems for branching patterns are given. The work concludes with descriptions of recent work on branching patterns, related to the classical Weyl groups, and the equivariant Hopf bifurcation.