Review : the Arithmetic of Dynamical Systems , by Joseph H . Silverman

The field of dynamical systems traces its roots to Poincaré’s qualitative study of solutions to differential equations in the late nineteenth century. The subfield of complex dynamics, which was initiated by Fatou and Julia in the late 1910s but which did not draw substantial attention until the 1980s, focuses mainly on the iteration of rational functions. In the 1990s, number theorists began to study such iterations as well, noting parallels to certain aspects of the theory of elliptic curves. Since then, number-theoretic dynamics has begun to emerge as a field in its own right, especially concerning the rationality properties of periodic points.