  We introduce the reader to the "global flow reconstruction method". The
purpose of the method is to see if a given temporal sequence has been generated
by a low dimensional dynamics, and to determine that dimension and other
properties of the dynamics. The method is shown to work very well on the well
known Roessler system. An application of the method to the observational data
of the light curve of the irregular variable star R Scuti is presented. This
light curve is shown to have been generated by a 4 dimensional dynamics. From
the functional form of the flow we find that the Lyapunov dimension is close to
3.1.
