Customer Reviews

An Introduction to Symbolic Dynamics and Coding

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

It is late March as I write this. I have been reading the book since mid-January and have made it to page 77. This is in spite of the fact that I put in about 10 hours a week on it. The bulk of the time is spent learning the language for new concepts. I am pleased with the book in that it does an excellent job of foreshadowing those concepts in the wonderful examples and in the exercises.

I would give the advice to do as many of the exercises as possible while continuing to read ahead. If you do this, you will be prepare for what is to come, but you will be less likely to get bogged down.

I began this book because I wanted to understand entropy. It looks as if I will be well-prepared for that when I get to the topic in a few more weeks. It is only about 20 or so more pages away.

I bought my first copy of this book several years ago and worked through the first two chapters just for fun. Plenty of good problems that are accessible to undergrads but also challenging. I used the book for an undergrad reading course and it went very well. This year I had to purchase another copy of Lind and Marcus because I lost my first one. I am working with a graduate student reading Kitchen's book and it is not long on detail. Lind and Marcus really helped us out a lot. In future I think I would start with Lind and Marcus though Kitchen's book has a lot to offer, too. They are not the same book in any way.
I don't believe there are any accessible books on symbolic dynamics except this one and thankfully it's really well written. I would recommend it to anyone.

I used this book in a senior level math course named "Symbolic Dynamics". At the time (and still to this day I believe), this was the ONLY undergraduate text available on this subject. Overall this is a good book, but it IS (as another reviewer put it) somewhat densely written and does follow the path of proposition, theorem, corollary; proposition, theorem, corollary,
with some examples spaced between them. The examples overall are OK but not great. More examples would have helped. The questions at the end of each section are also OK but some of them are quite tough. Even though this book was I believe written for senior level undergraduates, it easily serves as a graduate textbook (In fact half of the students in my class were taking the course at a graduate level) and takes alot of time and effort to fully grasp for an average math student. However the subject material itself is somewhat difficult in my opinion (although enjoyable). If you're an honors student then you might have an easier time with this book. I did however enjoy using this book as overall it was well written (and it was the only undergraduate text available!).

Well, this seems to be the only textbook on the topic of Symbolic Dynamics, but I think it fails as an "introduction". The initial chapter provides very little motivation for the use of Symbolic Dynamics, how it differs or improves on other fields such as Coding Theory and Dynamic Systems, and what kind of problems it would be most suitable for. Frankly, about 20 pages into the book I couldn't even remember why I was reading it.

For better or worse (worse, in my case) the book is written in the style of traditional graduate math books... Definition, Proposition, Definition, Proposition, Definition, Proposition... with very little intervening discussion. Simple, simple concepts are presented in dense, dense notation. Some people appreciate this, I'm sure. Not me.

In summary, I believe this book is written for smarter people than engineering sorts like myself, but as the only text in the area I think a more inclusive approach would have been appropriate.

This is an excellent and self-contained introduction to Symbolic Dynamics. As the title implies, it focuses mainly on coding issues, with some applications to linear algebra.

Now this is literature! It is set in a world where the characters all have infinitely long names. This sometimes makes it hard to tell them apart. There's a transformation that causes them to "shift", more or less trading places. It actually reminds me a lot of the Star Trek movie where Captain Picard is being shifted through time because of a quantum singularity. Man, was that a great flick! But I don't think Lind and Marcus ripped off Star Trek or anything like that. They spend a lot of time developing "dimension groups," which are equilateral triangles perhaps a half-centimeter wide. But in their hearts everyone knows it's only a matter of time until the little triangles fail them. Kim-Roush, a sinister figure from Alabama, lurks in the shadows. The reader is left to ponder their doomed yet dynamic existence.

This is way better than The DaVinci Code and therefore must get 5 stars.