Structurally stable systems were introduced by Aleksandr Andronov and Lev Pontryagin in 1937 under the name "systèmes grossiers", or rough systems. They announced a characterization of rough systems in the plane, the Andronov–Pontryagin criterion. In this case, structurally stable systems are "typical", they form an open dense set in the space of all systems endowed with appropriate topology. In higher dimensions, this is no longer true, indicating that typical dynamics can be very complex (cf strange attractor). An important class of structurally stable systems in arbitrary dimensions is given by Anosov diffeomorphisms and flows.