Pattern formation and periodic structures in systems modeled by reaction-diffusion equations

u(x, /) is an n vector which defines the state of the system at a given point x at time /. The nonlinear function F describes the "kinetics" of the medium while the diffusion effects enter via the term AAu. A is a diagonal matrix with nonnegative entries and A is the Laplace operator in the appropriate number of space dimensions, in this paper one or two. In a spatially homogeneous configuration the state of the system evolves according to