Contrast of Perspectives of Coherency

Mixing and coherence are fundamental issues at the heart of understanding fluid dynamics and other non-autonomous dynamical systems. Recently the notion of coherence has come to a more rigorous footing, in particular, within the studies of finite-time nonautonomous dynamical systems. Here we recall “shape coherent sets” which is proven to correspond to slowly evolving curvature, for which tangency of finite time stable foliations (related to a “forward time” perspective) and finite time unstable foliations (related to a “backwards time” perspective) serve a central role. We compare and contrast this perspective to both the variational method of geodesics [17], as well as the coherent pairs perspective [12] from transfer operators.