The theory describes dynamical phenomena which occur on objects modelled by fractals.
It studies questions such as "how does heat diffuse in a fractal?" and "How does a fractal vibrate?"
In the smooth case the operator that occurs most often in the equations modelling these questions is the Laplacian, so the starting point for the theory of analysis on fractals is to define a Laplacian on fractals. This turns out not to be a full differential operator in the usual sense but has many of the desired properties. There are a number of approaches to defining the Laplacian: probabilistic, analytical or measure theoretic.
Christoph Bandt; Siegfried Graf; Martina Zähle (2000). Fractal Geometry and Stochastics II. Birkhäuser. ISBN978-3-7643-6215-7.
Jun Kigami (2001). Analysis on Fractals. Cambridge University Press. ISBN978-0-521-79321-6.
Robert S. Strichartz (2006). Differential Equations on Fractals. Princeton. ISBN978-0-691-12542-8.
Pavel Exner; Jonathan P. Keating; Peter Kuchment; Toshikazu Sunada & Alexander Teplyaev (2008). Analysis on graphs and its applications: Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences, Cambridge, UK, January 8-June 29, 2007. AMS Bookstore. ISBN978-0-8218-4471-7.