The Firmament of Time by Loren Eiseley

Introduction to conjugacy problems for difieomorphisms. This is a survey article on the area of global analysis defined by differentiable dynamical systems or equivalently the action (differentiable) of a Lie group G on a manifold M. An action is a homomorphism G-Diff(M) such that the induced map GXM-M is differentiable. Here Diff(M) is the group of all diffeomorphisms of M and a diffeomorphism is a differentiable map with a differentiable inverse. Everything will be discussed here from the C«> or C" point of view. All manifolds maps, etc. will be differentiable (Cr, 1;;:; r ~ 00) unless stated otherwise.