Dynamics of piecewise contractions of the interval

Abstract: We study the asymptotical behaviour of iterates of piecewise contractive maps of the interval. It is known that Poincar\'e first return maps induced by some Cherry flows on transverse intervals are, up to topological conjugacy, piecewise contractions. These maps also appear in discretely controlled dynamical systems, describing the time evolution of manufacturing process adopting some decision-making policies. An injective map $f:[0,1)\to [0,1)$ is a {\it piecewise contraction of $n$ intervals}, if there exists a partition of the interval $[0,1)$ into $n$ intervals $I_1$,..., $I_n$ such that for every $i\in{1,...,n}$, the restriction $f|_{I_i}$ is $\kappa$-Lipschitz for some $\kappa\in (0,1)$. We prove that every piecewise contraction $f$ of $n$ intervals has at most $n$ periodic orbits. Moreover, we show that every piecewise contraction is topologically conjugate to a piecewise linear contraction.