Topological entropy of polygon exchange transformations and polygonal billiards

摘要

We study the lopological entropy of a class of transformations with mild singularities: the generalized polygon exchanges. This class contains, in particular, polygonal billiards. Our main result is a geometric estimate, from above, on the topological entropy of generalized polygon exchanges. One of the applications of our estimate is that the topological entropy of polygonal billiards is zero. This implies the subexponential growth of various geometric quantities associated with a polygon. Other applications are to the piecewise isometrics in two dimensions, and to billiards in rational polyhedra.