Associate Professors of Mathematics Andrew Dykstra and Michelle LeMasurier recently participated in the 53rd Spring Topology and Dynamical Systems Conference at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. They were invited to present talks in the Dynamical Systems special session.
Dykstra discussed “The Number of Minimal Subsystems in a Transitive Subshift of Linear Complexity,” based on his ongoing research with Nic Ormes and Ronnie Pavlov from the University of Denver.
Dykstra said the work deals with questions that date back to at least the 1980s, and the results are relevant to two sub-fields of Dynamical Systems — Topological Dynamics and Ergodic Theory. His presentation focused primarily on the group’s topological results.
LeMasurier’s talk was titled “When is a minimal subshift generated by substitutions?” She explained a result that can be used to determine whether an infinite sequence is generated by a mapping called a substitution. The result can then be used to prove that a certain dynamical system conjugate to the well-known Morse-Thue system is not generated by a substitution.
