Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Concept
Arnold's cat map
Summary
In mathematics, Arnold's cat map is a chaotic map from the torus into itself, named after Vladimir Arnold, who demonstrated its effects in the 1960s using an image of a cat, hence the name.
Thinking of the torus as the quotient space , Arnold's cat map is the transformation given by the formula
Equivalently, in matrix notation, this is
That is, with a unit equal to the width of the square image, the image is sheared one unit up, then two units to the right, and all that lies outside that unit square is shifted back by the unit until it is within the square.
Γ is invertible because the matrix has determinant 1 and therefore its inverse has integer entries,
Γ is area preserving,
Γ has a unique hyperbolic fixed point (the vertices of the square). The linear transformation which defines the map is hyperbolic: its eigenvalues are irrational numbers, one greater and the other smaller than 1 (in absolute value), so they are associated respectively to an expanding and a contracting eigenspace which are also the stable and unstable manifolds. The eigenspaces are orthogonal because the matrix is symmetric. Since the eigenvectors have rationally independent components both the eigenspaces densely cover the torus. Arnold's cat map is a particularly well-known example of a hyperbolic toral automorphism, which is an automorphism of a torus given by a square unimodular matrix having no eigenvalues of absolute value 1.
The set of the points with a periodic orbit is dense on the torus. Actually a point is periodic if and only if its coordinates are rational.
Γ is topologically transitive (i.e. there is a point whose orbit is dense).
The number of points with period is exactly (where and are the eigenvalues of the matrix). For example, the first few terms of this series are 1, 5, 16, 45, 121, 320, 841, 2205 .... (The same equation holds for any unimodular hyperbolic toral automorphism if the eigenvalues are replaced.)
Γ is ergodic and mixing,
Γ is an Anosov diffeomorphism and in particular it is structurally stable.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.
Ontological neighbourhood
Related publications (12)
Related concepts (4)
Anosov diffeomorphism
In mathematics, more particularly in the fields of dynamical systems and geometric topology, an Anosov map on a manifold M is a certain type of mapping, from M to itself, with rather clearly marked local directions of "expansion" and "contraction". Anosov systems are a special case of Axiom A systems. Anosov diffeomorphisms were introduced by Dmitri Victorovich Anosov, who proved that their behaviour was in an appropriate sense generic (when they exist at all).
Measure-preserving dynamical system
In mathematics, a measure-preserving dynamical system is an object of study in the abstract formulation of dynamical systems, and ergodic theory in particular. Measure-preserving systems obey the Poincaré recurrence theorem, and are a special case of conservative systems. They provide the formal, mathematical basis for a broad range of physical systems, and, in particular, many systems from classical mechanics (in particular, most non-dissipative systems) as well as systems in thermodynamic equilibrium.
Dynamical system
In mathematics, a dynamical system is a system in which a function describes the time dependence of a point in an ambient space, such as in a parametric curve. Examples include the mathematical models that describe the swinging of a clock pendulum, the flow of water in a pipe, the random motion of particles in the air, and the number of fish each springtime in a lake. The most general definition unifies several concepts in mathematics such as ordinary differential equations and ergodic theory by allowing different choices of the space and how time is measured.