Rigorous computation of expansion in one-dimensional dynamics

Abstract

We introduce an effective algorithmic method for the computation of a lower bound for uniform expansion in one-dimensional dynamics. The approach employs interval arithmetic and thus provides a rigorous numerical result (computer-assisted proof). The method uses efficient graph algorithms and an iterative approach for optimal performance. A software implementation of the method is made publicly available. This is an example of a quantitative result in the theory of dynamical systems, as opposed to many qualitative results whose assumptions may be difficult to verify and the conclusions may have limited use in practical models that describe natural phenomena. We discuss and illustrate the effectiveness of our method and apply it to the quadratic map family.