Cylinder Set - Applications

Applications

Cylinder sets are often used to define a topology on sets that are subsets of and occur frequently in the study of symbolic dynamics; see, for example, subshift of finite type. Cylinder sets are often used to define a measure; for example, the measure of a cylinder set of length m might be given by 1/m or by . Since strings in can be considered to be p-adic numbers, some of the theory of p-adic numbers can be applied to cylinder sets, and in particular, the definition of p-adic measures and p-adic metrics apply to cylinder sets. Cylinder sets may be used to define a metric on the space: for example, one says that two strings are ε-close if a fraction 1-ε of the letters in the strings match.

Cylinder sets over topological vector spaces are the core ingredient in the formal definition of the Feynman path integral or functional integral of quantum field theory, and the partition function of statistical mechanics.