Probability Measures on Semigroups: Convolution Products, Random Walks and Random Matrices

A Scientific American article on chaos, see Crutchfield et al. (1986), illus­ trates a very persuasive example of recurrence. A painting of Henri Poincare, or rather a digitized version of it, is stretched and cut to produce a mildly distorted image of Poincare. The same procedure is applied to the distorted image and the process is repeated over and over again on the successively more and more bl...