Applications of the min-max symbols of multimodal maps

The min-max symbols generalize the kneading symbols in that they contain also information about the minimum or maximum character of the critical values and their iterates. Interestingly enough, this additional information can be obtained from the kneading symbols without further computation. In this paper we review some interesting applications of the min-max symbols. The applications chosen concern new expressions for the topological entropy of multimodal maps, as well as a numerical algorithm to compute it.