Slices of Thurston's Master Teapot

Abstract: Thurston's Master Teapot is the closure of the set of all points $(z,\lambda) \in \mathbb{C} \times \mathbb{R}$ such that $\lambda$ is the growth rate of a critically periodic unimodal self-map of an interval and $z$ is a Galois conjugate of $\lambda$. I will present a new characterization of which points are in this set. This characterization gives a way to think of each horizontal slice of the Master Teapot as an analogy of the Mandelbrot set for a "restricted iterated function system.'' An application of this characterization is that the Master Teapot is not invariant under the map $(z,\lambda) \mapsto (-z,\lambda)$. This presentation is based on joint work with Chenxi Wu.

complex variablesdynamical systemsgeometric topology

Audience: researchers in the topic

Informal geometry and dynamics seminar