Hypercyclic operator


In mathematics, especially functional analysis, a hypercyclic operator on a Banach space X is a bounded linear operator T: XX such that there is a vector xX such that the sequence is dense in the whole space X. In other words, the smallest closed invariant subset containing x is the whole space. Such an x is then called hypercyclic vector.
There is no hypercyclic operator in finite-dimensional spaces, but the property of hypercyclicity in spaces of infinite dimension is not a rare phenomenon: many operators are hypercyclic.
The hypercyclicity is a special case of broader notions of topological transitivity, and universality. Universality in general involves a set of mappings from one topological space to another, but has a similar meaning to hypercyclicity. Examples of universal objects were discovered already in 1914 by Julius Pál, in 1935 by Józef Marcinkiewicz, or MacLane in 1952. However, it was not until the 1980s when hypercyclic operators started to be more intensively studied.

Examples

An example of a hypercyclic operator is two times the backward shift operator on the ℓ2 sequence space, that is the operator, which takes a sequence
to a sequence
This was proved in 1969 by Rolewicz.

Known results