The mathematical research of William Parry FRS

In this article we survey the mathematical research of the late William (Bill) Parry, FRS

Equivalence of relative Gibbs and relative equilibrium measures for actions of countable amenable groups

We formulate and prove a very general relative version of the Dobrushin-Lanford-Ruelle theorem which gives conditions on constraints of configuration spaces over a finite alphabet such that for every absolutely summable relative interaction, every translation-invariant relative Gibbs measure is a relative equilibrium measure and vice versa. Neither implication is true without some assumption on the space of configurations. We note that the usual finite type condition can be relaxed to a much more general class of constraints. By "relative" we mean that both the interaction and the set of allowed configurations are determined by a random environment. The result includes many special cases that are well known. We give several applications including (1) Gibbsian properties of measures that maximize pressure among all those that project to a given measure via a topological factor map from one symbolic system to another; (2) Gibbsian properties of equilibrium measures for group shifts defined on arbitrary countable amenable groups; (3) A Gibbsian characterization of equilibrium measures in terms of equilibrium condition on lattice slices rather than on finite sets; (4) A relative extension of a theorem of Meyerovitch, who proved a version of the Lanford--Ruelle theorem which shows that every equilibrium measure on an arbitrary subshift satisfies a Gibbsian property on interchangeable patterns.Comment: 37 pages and 3 beautiful figure

Shifts of finite type with nearly full entropy

For any fixed alphabet A, the maximum topological entropy of a Z^d subshift with alphabet A is obviously log |A|. We study the class of nearest neighbor Z^d shifts of finite type which have topological entropy very close to this maximum, and show that they have many useful properties. Specifically, we prove that for any d, there exists beta_d such that for any nearest neighbor Z^d shift of finite type X with alphabet A for which log |A| - h(X) < beta_d, X has a unique measure of maximal entropy. Our values of beta_d decay polynomially (like O(d^(-17))), and we prove that the sequence must decay at least polynomially (like d^(-0.25+o(1))). We also show some other desirable properties for such X, for instance that the topological entropy of X is computable and that the unique m.m.e. is isomorphic to a Bernoulli measure. Though there are other sufficient conditions in the literature which guarantee a unique measure of maximal entropy for Z^d shifts of finite type, this is (to our knowledge) the first such condition which makes no reference to the specific adjacency rules of individual letters of the alphabet.Comment: 33 pages, accepted by Proceedings of the London Mathematical Societ

Defect Particle Kinematics in One-Dimensional Cellular Automata

Let A^Z be the Cantor space of bi-infinite sequences in a finite alphabet A, and let sigma be the shift map on A^Z. A `cellular automaton' is a continuous, sigma-commuting self-map Phi of A^Z, and a `Phi-invariant subshift' is a closed, (Phi,sigma)-invariant subset X of A^Z. Suppose x is a sequence in A^Z which is X-admissible everywhere except for some small region we call a `defect'. It has been empirically observed that such defects persist under iteration of Phi, and often propagate like `particles'. We characterize the motion of these particles, and show that it falls into several regimes, ranging from simple deterministic motion, to generalized random walks, to complex motion emulating Turing machines or pushdown automata. One consequence is that some questions about defect behaviour are formally undecidable.Comment: 37 pages, 9 figures, 3 table