Topological and Symbolic Dynamics

Book excerpt: A dynamical system is a continuous self-map of a compact metric space. Topological dynamics studies the iterations of such a map, or equivalently, the trajectories of points of the state space. The basic concepts of topological dynamics are minimality, transitivity, recurrence, shadowing property, stability, equicontinuity, sensitivity, attractors, and topological entropy. Symbolic dynamics studies dynamical systems whose state spaces are zero-dimensional and consist of sequences of symbols. The main classes of symbolic dynamical systems are adding machines, subshifts of finite type, sofic subshifts, Sturmian, substitutive and Toeplitz subshifts, and cellular automata.