The Conley index theory was introduced by Charles C. Conley (1933-1984) in [C1] and a major part of the foundations of the theory was developed in Ph. D. theses of his students, see for example [Ch, Ku, Mon]. The Conley index associates the homotopy type of some pointed space to an isolated invariant set of a flow, just as the fixed point index associates an integer number to an isolated set of fixed points of a continuous map. Examples of isolated invariant sets arise naturally in the critical point theory - each isolated critical point of a functional is also an isolated invariant set of its gradient flow. If the critical point is nondegenerate then its Conley index is equal to the homotopy type of the pointed k-sphere, where k is the Morse index of that point. There are other relations to Morse theory, for example a generalization of Morse inequalities can be achieved. The aim of this note is to describe briefly some basic facts of the Conley index theory for (continuous-time) flows. We refer to [C2, Ry, S1, Smo] for a more detailed presentation. We do not touch more advanced topics of the theory: the Conley index as a connected simple system (see [C2, Ku, McM, S1]), connection and transition matrices (see [F1, F2, FM, McM, Mi1, Moe, Re]]), infinite dimensional Conley indices (see [Be, Ry], the Conley index for multivalued flows (see [KM, Mr2]), Conley-type indices for discrete-time flows (see [Mr3, RS, Sz]), equivariant Conley indices (see [Ba, Ge]), and relations to the Floer homology (see [S2]). (The list of bibliography items is far from completeness.) Moreover, we do not present any applications of the index. For some more recent results we refer to [Mi2]. We also refer to the other articles in this Proceedings.
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We announce a new result on determining the Conley index of the Poincaré map for a time-periodic non-autonomous ordinary differential equation. The index is computed using some singular cycles related to an index pair of a small-step discretization of the equation. We indicate how the result can be applied to computer-assisted proofs of the existence of bounded and periodic solutions. We provide also some comments on computer-assisted proving in dynamics.
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In this note we present the main ideas of the theory of the Conley index over a base space introduced in the papers [7, 8]. The theory arised as an attempt to solve two questions concerning the classical Conley index. In the definition of the index, the exit set of an isolating neighborhood is collapsed to a point. Some information is lost on this collapse. In particular, topological information about how a set sits in the phase space is lost. The first question addressed is how to retain some of the information which is lost on collapse. As an example, is it possible that two repelling periodic orbits which are not homotopic in the punctured plane are related by continuation? Clearly one cannot be continued to the other as periodic orbits, but the index of such a periodic orbit is the same as the index of the disjoint union of two rest points, so the question of continuation as isolated invariant sets is far less obvious.