The Real Fatou Conjecture

In 1920, Pierre Fatou expressed the conjecture that--except for special cases--all critical points of a rational map of the Riemann sphere tend to periodic orbits under iteration. This conjecture remains the main open problem in the dynamics of iterated maps. For the logistic family x- ax(1-x), it can be interpreted to mean that for a dense set of parameters "a," an attracting periodic orbit exists. The same question appears naturally in science, where the logistic family is used to construct mo