Feigenbaum attractor 2026-10-14
The Feigenbaum attractor is the compact Cantor set obtained from the nested restrictive-interval partitions of the Feigenbaum map. Every level interval has two descendant intervals. Their lengths vary with symbolic address, so a geometric topological pressure is useful for estimating its Hausdorff dimension.
Gibbs measure 2026-10-14
A Gibbs measure is a probability measure whose finite-block weights or conditional laws are determined by exponential potential sums and their normalization. One must specify whether the convention uses boundary-conditioned finite-volume laws, a normalized one-sided transition kernel, or symbolic Gibbs bounds. For the latter, cylinder probabilities are comparable to , where is topological pressure. These conventions have compatibility requirements; an arbitrary unnormalized one-sided potential need not define consistent finite-horizon conditional probabilities.
Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2001 iii Paper 55 4 ii Solution Created 2026-10-03 Updated 2026-10-14
Use the geometric properties of the Feigenbaum geometric potential: for some constants ,Here means variation between sequences agreeing in their first symbols. In particular . These are the standard bounds for the Feigenbaum geometric potential; the symbolic potential is not the singular expression at a quadratic critical point.
First allow all spins and use a fixed remote tail , writing for the weighted partition function. In a concatenated block of lengths and , replacing the history before the second block by changes its energy by at most : the th summand has the same first symbols, so its difference is at most . ThereforeFor , the almost-additive partition-function limit follows explicitly: is subadditive and superadditive, so Fekete's lemma gives the same finite limit for both after division by . The finiteness follows from bounded and the words.
Changing the fixed remote tail also changes each full energy by at most . The question fixes the first spin to one and sums the remaining spins; its partition function is . The tail comparison and bounded first contribution show that its normalized logarithm has the same limit. Thus the requested exists and equals the topological pressure of .
For any , every length- energy lies between and , henceTaking normalized logarithms and limits givesSo is Lipschitz continuous and strictly decreasing. For each finite , differentiation of the log-sum gives . Thus is convex, and passing to its finite pointwise limit proves that is convex too.
Thermodynamic formalism 2026-10-14
Thermodynamic formalism studies weighted orbit sums, invariant measures and geometric scaling through analogues of partition functions. A symbolic potential assigns a weight to each orbit segment; its asymptotic logarithmic normalization is topological pressure. The resulting Gibbs measure depends on the potential, so choosing an arbitrary Gibbs law does not automatically select geometric volume.