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.
2015 Nov 12

# Groups & dynamics: Elon Lindenstrauss (HUJI), "Rigidity of higher rank diagonalizable actions in positive characteristic"

10:00am to 11:00am

## Location:

Ross 70
Title: Rigidity of higher rank diagonalizable actions in positive characteristic
2015 Nov 19

# Groups & dynamics: Lei Yang (HUJI) "Equidistribution of expanding translates of curves in homogeneous spaces and Diophantine approximation"

10:00am to 11:00am

## Location:

Ross 70
Title: Equidistribution of expanding translates of curves in homogeneous spaces and Diophantine approximation. Abstract: We consider an analytic curve $\varphi: I \rightarrow \mathbb{M}(n\times m, \mathbb{R}) \hookrightarrow \mathrm{SL}(n+m, \mathbb{R})$ and embed it into some homogeneous space $G/\Gamma$, and translate it via some diagonal flow
2015 Dec 17

# Groups & dynamics: Robert Hough (IAS) - Mixing and cut-off on cyclic groups

12:00pm to 1:00pm

## Location:

Einstein 110
Consider a sequence of random walks on $\mathbb{Z}/p\mathbb{Z}$ with symmetric generating sets $A= A(p)$. I will describe known and new results regarding the mixing time and cut-off. For instance, if the sequence $|A(p)|$ is bounded then the cut-off phenomenon does not occur, and more precisely I give a lower bound on the size of the cut-off window in terms of $|A(p)|$. A natural conjecture from random walk on a graph is that the total variation mixing time is bounded by maximum degree times diameter squared.
2017 Dec 28

# Group actions seminar: Ilya Khayutin(IAS/Princeton)

10:30am to 11:30am

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 Mar 02

# Group actions seminar: David El-Chai Ben Ezra (HUJI) - The congruence subgroup problem for automorphism groups of  free meta-abelian groups

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.
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.
2016 Nov 03

# Monodromy groups & Arithmetics groups

## Lecturer:

V.N. Venkataramana
2:30pm

## Location:

Lecture Hall 2
To a linear differential equation on the projective line with finitely many points of singularities, is associated a monodromy group; when the singularities are "reguar singular", then the monodromy group gives more or less complete information about the (asymptotics of the ) solutions.

The cases of interest are the hypergeometric differential equations, and there is much recent work in this area, centred around a question of Peter Sarnak on the arithmeticity/thin-ness of these monodromy groups. I give a survey of these recent results.