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.

History
The idea goes back to Jacques Hadamard's 1898 paper on the geodesics on surfaces of negative
curvature.[1] 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.[2] 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.

Claude Shannon used symbolic sequences and shifts of finite type in his 1948 paper A mathematical theory
of communication that gave birth to information theory.

During the late 1960s the method of symbolic dynamics was developed to hyperbolic toral automorphisms
by Roy Adler and Benjamin Weiss,[3] and to Anosov diffeomorphisms by Yakov Sinai who used the
symbolic model to construct Gibbs measures.[4] In the early 1970s the theory was extended to Anosov
flows by Marina Ratner, and to Axiom A diffeomorphisms and flows by Rufus Bowen.

A spectacular application of the methods of symbolic dynamics is Sharkovskii's theorem about periodic
orbits of a continuous map of an interval into itself (1964).

Examples
Concepts such as heteroclinic orbits and homoclinic orbits have a particularly simple representation in
symbolic dynamics.

Itinerary

Itinerary of point with respect to the partition is a sequence of symbols. It describes dynamic of the point. [5]

Applications
Symbolic dynamics originated as a method to study general dynamical systems; now its techniques and
ideas have found significant applications in data storage and transmission, linear algebra, the motions of the
planets and many other areas. The distinct feature in symbolic dynamics is that time is measured in discrete
intervals. So at each time interval the system is in a particular state. Each state is associated with a symbol
and the evolution of the system is described by an infinite sequence of symbols—represented effectively as
strings. If the system states are not inherently discrete, then the state vector must be discretized, so as to get
a coarse-grained description of the system.

See also
Measure-preserving dynamical system
Combinatorics and dynamical systems
Shift space
Shift of finite type
Complex dynamics
Arithmetic dynamics

References
1. Hadamard, J. (1898). "Les surfaces à courbures opposées et leurs lignes géodésiques" (htt
p://sites.mathdoc.fr/JMPA/PDF/JMPA_1898_5_4_A3_0.pdf) (PDF). J. Math. Pures Appl. 5
(4): 27–73.
2. Morse, M.; Hedlund, G. A. (1938). "Symbolic Dynamics". American Journal of Mathematics.
60 (4): 815–866. doi:10.2307/2371264 (https://doi.org/10.2307%2F2371264).
JSTOR 2371264 (https://www.jstor.org/stable/2371264).
3. Adler, R.; Weiss, B. (1967). "Entropy, a complete metric invariant for automorphisms of the
torus" (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC224513). PNAS. 57 (6): 1573–1576.
Bibcode:1967PNAS...57.1573A (https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1967PNAS...57.1573A).
doi:10.1073/pnas.57.6.1573 (https://doi.org/10.1073%2Fpnas.57.6.1573). JSTOR 57985 (htt
ps://www.jstor.org/stable/57985). PMC 224513 (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/P
MC224513). PMID 16591564 (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16591564).
4. Sinai, Y. (1968). "Construction of Markov partitionings". Funkcional. Anal. I Priložen. 2 (3):
70–80.
5. Mathematics of Complexity and Dynamical Systems by Robert A. Meyers. Springer Science
& Business Media, 2011, ISBN 1461418054, 9781461418054

Further reading
Hao, Bailin (1989). Elementary Symbolic Dynamics and Chaos in Dissipative Systems (http
s://web.archive.org/web/20091205014855/http://power.itp.ac.cn/~hao/). World Scientific.
ISBN 9971-5-0682-3. Archived from the original (http://power.itp.ac.cn/~hao/) on 2009-12-05.
Retrieved 2009-12-02.
Bruce Kitchens, Symbolic dynamics. One-sided, two-sided and countable state Markov
shifts. Universitext, Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 1998. x+252 pp. ISBN 3-540-62738-3
MR1484730 (https://mathscinet.ams.org/mathscinet-getitem?mr=1484730)
Lind, Douglas; Marcus, Brian (1995). An introduction to symbolic dynamics and coding (htt
p://www.math.washington.edu/SymbolicDynamics/). Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-
521-55124-2. MR 1369092 (https://mathscinet.ams.org/mathscinet-getitem?mr=1369092).
Zbl 1106.37301 (https://zbmath.org/?format=complete&q=an:1106.37301).
G. A. Hedlund, Endomorphisms and automorphisms of the shift dynamical system (https://do
i.org/10.1007%2FBF01691062). Math. Systems Theory, Vol. 3, No. 4 (1969) 320–3751
Teschl, Gerald (2012). Ordinary Differential Equations and Dynamical Systems (https://www.
mat.univie.ac.at/~gerald/ftp/book-ode/). Providence: American Mathematical Society.
 ISBN 978-0-8218-8328-0.
"Symbolic dynamics" (http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Symbolic_dynamics).
Scholarpedia.

External links
ChaosBook.org (http://chaosbook.org/) Chapter "Transition graphs"
A simulation of the three-bumper billiard system and its symbolic dynamics, from Chaos V:
Duhem's Bull (https://www.chaos-math.org/en/chaos-v-billiards.html)

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