Computational approaches to mixing rates in dynamical systems
by
Rua Murray
University of Waikato

It is often interesting to know how quickly a given dynamical system mixes to its natural invariant measure. This rate is given by the second largest eigenvalue of an associated transfer operator, a quantity that is in general rather hard to obtain. In this talk I will briefly discuss the relevance of dynamical \zeta-functions to this problem, and suggest some computational approaches based on Ulam-type spatial discretization schemes. Some preliminary, but encouraging, numerical evidence will be presented for low dimensional maps.

Date received: June 21, 1999