• 2017 Dec 21

# Groups & Dynamics: Jeremy Kahn (Brown University) - Surface Subgroups in Nonuniform Lattices

10:30am to 11:30am

## Location:

Ross 70
Abstract:
In 2009 the speaker and Vladimir Markovic constructed nearly geodesic surfaces in a given closed hyperbolic 3-manifold M. The construction proceeded by taking all "good pants" in M and matching them at their boundaries to produce a closed surface. I will describe this construction, as well as a new construction with Alexander Wright, of a nearly geodesic surface in the case where M has a cusp. If time permits, I will discuss the potential applications of this construction to higher rank nonuniform lattices and mapping class groups.
• 2017 Dec 07

# Groups & dynamics: Doron Puder (TAU)

10:30am to 11:30am

• 2017 Nov 02

# Group actions: Remi Coulon (Rennes) - Growth gap in hyperbolic groups and amenability

10:30am to 11:30am

## Location:

hyperbolic groups and amenability
(joint work with Françoise Dal'Bo and Andrea Sambusetti)
Given a finitely generated group G acting properly on a metric space X,
the exponential growth rate of G with respect to X measures "how big"
the orbits of G are. If H is a subgroup of G, its exponential growth
rate is bounded above by the one of G. In this work we are interested in
the following question: what can we say if H and G have the same
exponential growth rate? This problem has both a combinatorial and a
geometric origin. For the combinatorial part, Grigorchuck and Cohen
• 2017 Nov 02

# Group actions: Remi Coulon (Rennes) - Growth gap in hyperbolic groups and amenability

10:30am to 11:30am

## Location:

hyperbolic groups and amenability
(joint work with Françoise Dal'Bo and Andrea Sambusetti) Given a finitely generated group G acting properly on a metric space X, the exponential growth rate of G with respect to X measures "how big" the orbits of G are. If H is a subgroup of G, its exponential growth rate is bounded above by the one of G. In this work we are interested in the following question: what can we say if H and G have the same exponential growth rate? This problem has both a combinatorial and a geometric origin.
• 2017 Jun 29

# Special ergodic theory seminar: Abel Farkas (HUJI), Conditional measure on the Brownian path

10:00am to 11:00am

For a given deterministic measure we construct a random measure on the Brownian path that has expectation the given measure. For the construction we introduce the concept of weak convergence of random measures in probability. The machinery can be extended to more general sets than Brownian path.
• 2017 Jun 15

# Group actions: Nir Lazarovich (ETH Zurich): Detecting sphere boundaries of hyperbolic groups

10:00am to 11:00am

We show that the boundary of a one-ended simply connected at infinity hyperbolic group with enough codimension-1 surface subgroups is homeomorphic to a sphere. By works of Markovic and Kahn-Markovic our result gives a new characterization of groups which are virtually fundamental groups of hyperbolic 3-manifolds. Joint work with B. Beeker.
• 2017 Jun 01

# Group actions:Lei Yang - badly approximable points on curves and unipotent orbits in homogeneous spaces

10:30am to 11:30am

We will study n-dimensional badly approximable points on curves. Given an analytic non-degenerate curve in R^n, we will show that any countable intersection of the sets of weighted badly approximable points on the curve has full Hausdorff dimension. This strengthens a previous result of Beresnevich by removing the condition on weights. Compared with the work of Beresnevich, we study the problem through homogeneous dynamics. It turns out that the problem is closely related to the study of distribution of long pieces of unipotent orbits in homogeneous spaces.
• 2017 May 25

# Group actions/dynamics seminar: Sebastián Donoso (University of O'Higgins, Chile) Quantitative multiple recurrence for two and three transformations

10:00am to 11:00am

## Location:

Ross 70
In this talk I will provide some counter-examples for quantitative multiple
recurrence problems for systems with more than one transformation.  For
instance, I will show that there exists an ergodic system
$(X,\mathcal{X},\mu,T_1,T_2)$ with two commuting transformations such that
for every $\ell < 4$ there exists $A\in \mathcal{X}$ such that
$\mu(A\cap T_1^n A\cap T_2^n A) < \mu(A)^{\ell}$
for every $n \in \mathbb{N}$.
The construction of such a system is based on the study of big'' subsets
• 2017 May 04

# Group actions: Nicolas de Saxcé (Paris 13) - Diophantine approximation and diagonal flows on the space of lattices

10:00am to 11:00am

## Location:

Ross 70
For almost every real number x, the inequality |x-p/q|<1/q^a has finitely many solutions if and only if a>2. By Roth's theorem, any irrational algebraic number x also satisfies this property, so that from that point of view, algebraic numbers and random numbers behave similarly.
• 2017 Apr 27

# Group actions: Yair Glasner (BGU) - On Highly transitive permutation representations of groups.

10:30am to 11:30am

## Location:

Ross 70
Abstract: A permutation representation of a group G is called highly transitive if it is transitive on k-tuples of points for every k. Until just a few years ago groups admitting such permutation representations were thought of as rare. I will focus on three rather recent papers: G-Garion, Hall-Osin, Gelander-G-Meiri (in preparation) showing that such groups are in fact very common.