Cool, though I didn't understand it at all
The page doesn't say why matrices need to have whole-number (really just integer) entries, but I'd suspect it's because bad approximations to non-integer rationals accumulate sufficiently to make the recurrence unrecognizable.
It says that the underlying action is on the torus (R/Z)^2. If the entries of the matrix are not integers, do we have a well defined action on the torus? It seems to me that the answer is no because Z^2 would not be invariant by the action.
> It says that the underlying action is on the torus (R/Z)^2. If the entries of the matrix are not integers, do we have a well defined action on the torus? It seems to me that the answer is no because Z^2 would not be invariant by the action.
Ah, good point.
I clicked the link wondering if it would be about this "Arnold the Cat" or perhaps related to Simon's Cat: