C*-Algebras of Irreversible Dynamical Systems

We show that certain C*-algebras which have been studied among others by Arzumanian, Vershik, Deaconu, and Renault in connection to a measure preserving transformation of a measure space and/or to a covering map of a compact space are special cases of the endomorphism crossed-product construction recently introduced by the first named author. As a consequence these algebras are given presentations in terms of generators and relations. These results come as a consequence of a general Theorem on faithfulness of representations which are covariant with respect to certain circle actions. For the case of topologically free covering maps we prove a stronger result on faithfulness of representations which needs no covariance. We also give a necessary and sufficient condition for simplicity.