Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

Suppose you want to stir a pot of soup with several spoons. What is the most efficient way to do this? Thurston's theory of surface homeomorphisms gives us a concrete way to analyze this question. That is, to each mixing pattern we can associate a real number called the entropy. We'll start from scratch with a simple example, state the Nielsen-Thurston classification of surface homeomorphisms, and give some open questions about entropies of surface homeomorphisms.