PIMS/WMAX Postdoctoral Colloquium: Tom Meyerovich (PIMS-UBC)

Entropy" is a key notion in the study in of dynamical systems. This quantity reflects the "uncertainty", or "randomness" of a system. Subshifts are topological dynamical systems whose elements are sequences over a given finite alphabet. A translation-invariant measure on a subshift corresponds to a finite-valued stationary stochastic process. Measures obtaining maximal entropy are in some sense "most random" or "most uniform" among those with a given support. In this talk, I will present older and newer results of various authors regarding measures of maximal entropy.