Defect-controlled numerical methods and shadowing for chaotic differential equations

It is well-known that chaotic ODE's are, in the classical sense, unstable or ill-conditioned. It is not clear that variable step-size codes based on local error control can solve such problems in a useful way. In particular, it is usually difficult to show that the apparent chaos in the resulting solution is not a numerical artifact. I show here that a defect-controlled method gives useful solutions for chaotic problems. A pragmatically modified definition of what it means for a dynamical system to be chaotic is also presented.