Symbolic dynamics

In mathematics, symbolic dynamics is the practice of modeling a topological or smooth dynamical system by a discrete space consisting of infinite sequences of abstract symbols, each of which corresponds to a state of the system, with the dynamics (evolution) given by the shift operator. Formally, a Markov partition is used to provide a finite cover for the smooth system; each set of the cover is associated with a single symbol, and the sequences of symbols result as a trajectory of the system moves from one covering set to another.

The idea goes back to Jacques Hadamard's 1898 paper on the geodesics on surfaces of negative curvature. It was applied by Marston Morse in 1921 to the construction of a nonperiodic recurrent geodesic. Related work was done by Emil Artin in 1924 (for the system now called Artin billiard), Pekka Myrberg, Paul Koebe, Jakob Nielsen, G. A. Hedlund.

The first formal treatment was developed by Morse and Hedlund in their 1938 paper.George Birkhoff, Norman Levinson and the pair Mary Cartwright and J. E. Littlewood have applied similar methods to qualitative analysis of nonautonomous second order differential equations.

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