Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

Take a map from the interval [0,1] to itself. Such a map can be iterated, and many phenomena (such as periodic points) arise. An interval self-map is an example of a topological dynamical system that is simple enough to set up, but wildly complex to analyze. In the late 1970s, Milnor and Thurston developed a combinatorial framework for studying interval self-maps in their paper "Iterated maps of the interval". In this talk, we will give an introduction to the central questions in the study of iterated interval maps, share some illustrative examples, and lay out some of the techniques and results of Milnor and Thurston.