About forty years have passed since Charles Conley defined the homotopy index. Thereby, he generalized the ideas that go back to the calculus of variations work of Marston Morse. Within this long time the Conley index has proved to be a valuable tool in nonlinear analysis and dynamical systems. A significant development of applied methods has been observed. Later, the index theory has evolved to cover such areas as discrete dynamical...

We define a spectral flow for paths of selfadjoint Fredholm operators that are equivariant under the orthogonal action of a compact Lie group as an element of the representation ring of the latter. This G-equivariant spectral flow shares all common properties of the integer valued classical spectral flow, and it can be non-trivial even if the classical spectral flow vanishes. Our main theorem uses the G-equivariant spectral flow...

The paper is concerned with the Morse equation for flows in a representation of a compact Lie group. As a consequence of this equation we give a relationship between the equivariant Conley index of an isolated invariant set of the flow given by x˙ = − ∇f(x) and the gradient equivariant degree of ∇f. Some multiplicity results are also presented.

A multiplicative structure in the cohomological versjon of Conley index is described . In the case of equivariant flows we apply the normalization procedure known from equivariant degree theory and we propose a new continuation invariant. The theory is then applied to obtain a mountain pass type theorem. Another application is a result on multiple bifurcations for some elliptic PDE.

We investigate relations between stable equivariant homotopy groups of spheres in classical and gradient categories. To this end, the auxiliary category of orthogonal equivariant maps, a natural enlargement of the category of gradient maps, is used. Our result allows for describing stable equivariant homotopy groups of spheres in the category of orthogonal maps in terms of classical stable equivariant groups of spheres with shifted...