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Preface The discipline of Nonlinear Dynamical Systems has expanded tremendously over the past five decades and the last couple of years several surveys and encyclopaedia have seen the light. The present book is the third volume of a Handbook that covers a wide range of subjects in the area. The chapters are written in such a way that the handbook forms an extensive entrance to the literature. The present volume focuses on the conceptual, and often geometric, aspects of the theory in the spirit of Poincar´e and Lyapunov and later of Andronov, Thom and Smale. Important notions of dynamical systems often are framed in terms of persistence under variation of initial positions and of system parameters. A particular case of this is that of structural stability under various equivalence relations like topological conjugacy or equivalence, amounting to the stable system being an interior point of its equivalence class. Often structural stability is a far too restrictive notion of persistence. A broader notion is provided by the idea of a generic property,