Entropy in Dimension One

This paper completely classifies which numbers arise as the topological entropy associated to postcritically finite self-maps of the unit interval. Specifically, a positive real number h is the topological entropy of a postcritically finite self-map of the unit interval if and only if exp(h) is an algebraic integer that is at least as large as the absolute value of any of the conjugates of exp(h); that is, if exp(h) is a weak Perron number. The postcritically finite map may be chosen to be a polynomial all of whose critical points are in the interval (0,1). This paper also proves that the weak Perron numbers are precisely the numbers that arise as exp(h), where h is the topological entropy associated to ergodic train track representatives of outer automorphisms of a free group.Comment: 38 pages, 15 figures. This paper was completed by the author before his death, and was uploaded by Dylan Thurston. A version including endnotes by John Milnor will appear in the proceedings of the Banff conference on Frontiers in Complex Dynamic

Contact Structures of Sasaki Type and their Associated Moduli

This article is based on a talk at the RIEMain in Contact conference in Cagliari, Italy in honor of the 78th birthday of David Blair one of the founders of modern Riemannian contact geometry. The present article is a survey of a special type of Riemannian contact structure known as Sasakian geometry. An ultimate goal of this survey is to understand the moduli of classes of Sasakian structures as well as the moduli of extremal and constant scalar curvature Sasaki metrics, and in particular the moduli of Sasaki-Einstein metrics.Comment: 48 page

A quasidouble of the affine plane of order 4 and the solution of a problem on additive designs

A 2-(v,k,λ) block design (P,B) is additive if, up to isomorphism, P can be represented as a subset of a commutative group (G,+) in such a way that the k elements of each block in B sum up to zero in G. If, for some suitable G, the embedding of P in G is also such that, conversely, any zero-sum k-subset of P is a block in B, then (P,B) is said to be strongly additive. In this paper we exhibit the very first examples of additive 2-designs that are not strongly additive, thereby settling an open problem posed in 2019. Our main counterexample is a resolvable 2-(16,4,2) design (F_4×F_4, B_2), which decomposes into two disjoint isomorphic copies of the affine plane of order four. An essential part of our construction is a (cyclic) decomposition of the point-plane design of AG(4,2) into seven disjoint isomorphic copies of the affine plane of order four. This produces, in addition, a solution to Kirkman's schoolgirl problem