Topological entropy of geodesic flows on simply connected manifolds, and related topics (Q4382571)

The author relates the topological entropy \(h(g)\) of a smooth metric \(g\) on a simply connected closed manifold \(M\) to the topological complexity of \(M\). For this he defines a metric invariant \(D^h(M,g)\) of \(g\) which measures the stretch of Lipschitz maps from the standard simplex into \(M\) which formally combine to special singular chains representing a nontrivial homology class. He then uses an estimate of the rank of the homotopy group \(\pi_{k+ 1} (M)\) be the \(k\)-th Betti number of the space of curves with fixed endpoints of length at most \(kD^h(M,g) -\text{diam} (M,g)+ \varepsilon\) to derive the inequality \(h(g)\geq D^h (M,g)^{-1} \lim \sup_{k\to\infty} {1\over k} \log (rk\pi_k(M))\). Some applications are given. The paper also contains some discussion on estimates for the systole of \(g\). Major parts of the paper are expository.