Arnold's Cat (2018)
8 comments
·January 11, 2025JadeNB
pepinator
It says that the underlying action is on the torus (R/Z)^2. If the entries of the matrix are not integers, do we have a well defined action on the torus? It seems to me that the answer is no because Z^2 would not be invariant by the action.
kkylin
One can still define a map by taking the fractional part of the matrix-vector product, but the resulting map won't be continuous (with respect to the topology of the torus). In addition, if one wants the map be a homeomorphism (continuous with continuous inverse) then the determinant must have absolute value 1.
JadeNB
> It says that the underlying action is on the torus (R/Z)^2. If the entries of the matrix are not integers, do we have a well defined action on the torus? It seems to me that the answer is no because Z^2 would not be invariant by the action.
Ah, good point.
01HNNWZ0MV43FF
Cool, though I didn't understand it at all
TaurenHunter
I clicked the link wondering if it would be about this "Arnold the Cat" or perhaps related to Simon's Cat:
bnetd
[dead]
null
The page doesn't say why matrices need to have whole-number (really just integer) entries, but I'd suspect it's because bad approximations to non-integer rationals accumulate sufficiently to make the recurrence unrecognizable.