Complexity of injective piecewise contracting interval maps

Abstract

We study the complexity of the itineraries of injective piecewise contracting maps on the interval. We prove that for any such map the complexity function of any itinerary is eventually affine. We also prove that the growth rate of the complexity is bounded from above by the number, $N-1$, of discontinuities of the map. To show that this bound is optimal, we construct piecewise affine contracting maps whose itineraries all have the complexity $(N-1)n+1$. In these examples, the asymptotic dynamics take place in a minimal Cantor set containing all the discontinuities.