A theory of orbital behavior in a class of nonlinear systems: Chaos and a signature-based approach (Q579701)

The authors reproduce (and re-prove) some of the very nice results on itineraries and kneading sequences of unimodal maps from the book by \textit{P. Collet} and \textit{J.-P. Eckmann} [Iterated maps on the interval as dynamical systems (1980; Zbl 0458.58002)], many of which have their origins in previous publications (see the references in the above cited monograph). In particular they describe the space of possible itineraries of a given map in terms of its kneading sequence and prove parts of Sharkovskij's theorem (1964) [see also \textit{L. Block}, \textit{J. Guckenheimer}, \textit{M. Misiurewicz} and \textit{L. S. Young}, Lect. Notes Math. 819, 18-34 (1980; Zbl 0447.58028)] for a simple proof. It is a bit surprising that, although the book of Collet and Eckmann is cited as a background reference in this article, the authors do not refer to the results presented there. This may be due to what they call their system theoretic approach which differs heavily from the traditional symbolic dynamics method on the level of terminology.