Given a probability measure mu on the space of 2x2 matrices, there is, under mild conditions, a unique measure nu on the space of lines which is stationary for mu. This measure is called the Furstenberg measure of mu, and is important in many contexts, from the study of random matrix products to recent work on self-affine sets and measures. Of particular importance are the smoothness and dimension of the Furstenberg measure. In this talk I will discuss joint work with Boris Solomyak in which we adapt methods from

Abstract: I will describe joint work in progress with Aaron Brown, Federico Rodriguez-Hertz and Simion Filip. Our aim is to find some analogue, in the context of smooth dynamics, of Ratner's theorems on unipotent flows. This would be a (partial) generalization of the results of Benoist-Quint and my work with Elon Lindenstrauss in the homogeneous setting, the results of Brown and Rodriguez-Hertz in dimension 2, and the my results with Maryam Mirzakhani in the setting of Teichmuller dynamics.

A minimal representative for a dynamical system is a system that has the simplest possible dynamics in its topological equivalence class. This is very much related to "dynamical forcing": when existence of certain periodic orbits forces existence of others. This is quite useful in the analysis of chaotic systems. I'll give examples of minimal representatives in dimensions one two and three. In dimension three, I'll show that the minimal representative for the chaotic Lorenz equations (for the correct parameters) is the geodesic flow on the modular surface. This will be an introductory talk.

We consider Bourgain's sparse ergodic theorem for systems where quantitative mixing estimates are present. Focusing on the case of the horocyclic flow, we show how to use such estimates in order to bound the dimension of the exceptional set, providing evidence towards conjectures by N. Shah, G. Margulis and P. Sarnak. Moreover we show that there exists a bound which is independent from the spectral gap. The proof uses techniques from homogeneous dynamics, automorphic representations and number theory.

Consider a process in which points are assigned uniformly and independently at random on the interval [0,1]. It is a classical observation that after N points were assigned, the typical discrepancy of the empirical distribution, i.e., the maximum difference between the proportion of points on any interval and the length of that interval, is of order 1/sqrt{N}. Now consider a similar online process in which at every step an overseer is allowed to choose between two independent, uniformly chosen points on [0,1].   -- By how much can the overseer reduce the discrepancy of the selected points?

In ergodic dynamical systems almost every point is generic. Many times it is interesting to understand how large is the set of non-generic points. In this talk I will present a criterion for a set to have a nonempty intersection with every “regular fractal". We then apply this criterion to show that the set of badly approximable vectors with weights intersects every regular fractal, and put it in the context of diagonalizable actions on homogeneous spaces.  This talk is based on a joint work with Dzmitry Badziahin, Stephen Harrap and David Simmons.

The Teichmüller flow acts as a renormalization operator for interval exchange transformations. For this reason its properties give some insight about the dynamics of rational billiards. For example Lyapunov exponents of the Teichmüller flow are tightly related to equidistribution speed in rational billiards. Since the mid 90's M. Kontsevich and A. Zorich started computations of these exponents. After giving some motivating examples for the computation of these exponents and a brief overview of 30 years of intensive research (including works of

This talk will discuss some recent developments in the study of the spectral properties of parabolic flows and maps. More specifically, it will focus on the techniques used to determine the spectrum of the time-changes of the horocycle flow and and the effort to generalize these methods to create conditions under which a general parabolic flow/map would be expected to have absolutely continuous spectrum.

We consider self-similar  Iterated Function System (IFS) on the line constructed with overlapping cylinders. Recently there have been a number of outstanding results which have suggested that the overlap has dramatic change in the most important properties of the IFS only if there is an exact overlap between some of the cylinders. In this talk, we point out that this is not always the case, at least as far as the absolute continuity of self-similar measures is concerned. Namely, we present some one-parameter families of homogeneous self- similar measures on the line such that

Consider the Gaussian Entire Function (GEF) whose Taylor coefficients are independent complex-valued Gaussian variables, and the variance of the k-th coefficient is 1/k!. This random Taylor series is distinguished by the invariance of its zero set with respect to the isometries of the complex plane.

Consider a real Gaussian stationary process, either on Z or on R. That is, a stochastic process, invariant under translations, whose finite marginals are centered multi-variate Gaussians. The persistence of such a process on [0,N] is the probability that it remains positive throughout this interval. The relation between the decay of the persistence as N tends to infinity and the covariance function of the process has been investigated since the 1950s with motivations stemming from probability, engineering and mathematical physics. Nonetheless, until recently, good estimates were

I describe a language and set-up for proving monotonicity of entropy for families of interval maps which are defined locally. This can be seen as a local version of Thurston's algorithm. We apply this approach to prove the monotonicity and related results for families that are not covered by other methods (with flat critical point, piecewise linear, Lorenz-type, Arnold family and others) . Joint work with Weixiao Shen and Sebastian van Strien.

Abstract: