INFINITE KNEADING MATRICES AND WEIGHTED ZETA-FUNCTIONS OF INTERVAL MAPS

We consider a piecewise continuous, piecewise monotone interval map and a weight of bounded variation, constant on homtervals and continuous at periodic points of the map. With these data we associate a sequence of weighted Milnor-Thurston kneading matrices, converging to a countable matrix with coefficients analytic functions. We show that the determinants of these matrices converge to the inverse of the correspondingly weighted zeta function for the map. As a corollary, we obtain convergence of the discrete spectrum of the Perron-Frobenius operators of piecewise linear approximations of Markovian, piecewise expanding, and piecewise C-1+BV interval maps. (C) 1995 Academic Press, Inc.