Kneading Theory for Iteration of Monotonous Functions on the Real Line

Abstract

We construct a version of kneading theory for families of monotonous functions on the real line. The generality of the setup covers two classical results from Milnor-Thurston's kneading theory: the first one is to dynamically characterise an l-modal map by its kneading sequence, the second one is to define the concept of kneading determinant, relate it to topological entropy and use this to construct a certain type of special "linearazing measure".