Symbolic dynamics is a mature yet rapidly developing area of dynamical systems. It has established strong connections with many areas, including linear algebra, graph theory, probability, group theory, and the theory of computation, as well as data storage, statistical mechanics, and $C^*$-algebras. This Second Edition maintains the introductory character of the original 1995 edition as a general textbook on symbolic dynamics and its applications to coding. It is written at an elementary level and aimed at students, well-established researchers, and experts in mathematics, electrical engineering, and computer science. Topics are carefully developed and motivated with many illustrative examples. There are more than 500 exercises to test the reader's understanding. In addition to a chapter in the First Edition on advanced topics and a comprehensive bibliography, the Second Edition includes a detailed Addendum, with companion bibliography, describing major developments and new research directions since publication of the First Edition.

Nearly one hundred years ago Jacques Hadamard used infinite sequences of symbols to analyze the distribution of geodesics on certain surfaces. That was the beginning of symbolic dynamics. In the 1930's and 40's Arnold Hedlund and Marston Morse again used infinite sequences to investigate geodesics on surfaces of negative curvature. They coined the term symbolic dynamics and began to study sequence spaces with the shift transformation as dynamical systems. In the 1940's Claude Shannon used sequence spaces to describe infor mation channels. Since that time symbolic dynamics has been used in ergodic theory, topological dynamics, hyperbolic dynamics, information theory and complex dynamics. Symbolic dynamical systems with a finite memory are stud ied in this book. They are the topological Markov shifts. Each can be defined by transition rules and the rules can be summarized by a transition matrix. The study naturally divides into two parts. The first part is about topological Markov shifts where the alphabet is finite. The second part is concerned with topological Markov shifts whose alphabet is count ably infinite. The techniques used in the two cases are quite different. When the alphabet is finite most of the methods are combinatorial or algebraic. When the alphabet is infinite the methods are much more analytic. This book grew from notes for a graduate course taught at Wesleyan Uni versity in the fall of 1994 and is intended as a graduate text and as a reference book for mathematicians working in related fields.

Several distinctive aspects make Dynamical Systems unique, including: treating the subject from a mathematical perspective with the proofs of most of the results included providing a careful review of background materials introducing ideas through examples and at a level accessible to a beginning graduate student

This book is a monograph on chaos in dissipative systems written for those working in the physical sciences. Emphasis is on symbolic description of the dynamics and various characteristics of the attractors, and written from the view-point of practical applications without going into formal mathematical rigour. The author used elementary mathematics and calculus, and relied on physical intuition whenever possible. Substantial attention is paid to numerical techniques in the study of chaos. Part of the book is based on the publications of Chinese researchers, including those of the author's collaborators.

Internationally recognised researchers look at developing trends in combinatorics with applications in the study of words and in symbolic dynamics. They explain the important concepts, providing a clear exposition of some recent results, and emphasise the emerging connections between these different fields. Topics include combinatorics on words, pattern avoidance, graph theory, tilings and theory of computation, multidimensional subshifts, discrete dynamical systems, ergodic theory, numeration systems, dynamical arithmetics, automata theory and synchronised words, analytic combinatorics, continued fractions and probabilistic models. Each topic is presented in a way that links it to the main themes, but then they are also extended to repetitions in words, similarity relations, cellular automata, friezes and Dynkin diagrams. The book will appeal to graduate students, research mathematicians and computer scientists working in combinatorics, theory of computation, number theory, symbolic dynamics, tilings and stringology. It will also interest biologists using text algorithms.

This book describes the relation between profinite semigroups and symbolic dynamics. Profinite semigroups are topological semigroups which are compact and residually finite. In particular, free profinite semigroups can be seen as the completion of free semigroups with respect to the profinite metric. In this metric, two words are close if one needs a morphism on a large finite monoid to distinguish them. The main focus is on a natural correspondence between minimal shift spaces (closed shift-invariant sets of two-sided infinite words) and maximal J-classes (certain subsets of free profinite semigroups). This correspondence sheds light on many aspects of both profinite semigroups and symbolic dynamics. For example, the return words to a given word in a shift space can be related to the generators of the group of the corresponding J-class. The book is aimed at researchers and graduate students in mathematics or theoretical computer science.

Symbolic dynamics is a coarse-grained description of dynamics. It provides a rigorous way to understand the global systematics of periodic and chaotic motion in a system. In the last decade it has been applied to nonlinear systems described by one- and two-dimensional maps as well as by ordinary differential equations. This book will help practitioners in nonlinear science and engineering to master that powerful tool.