The paper surveys open problems and questions related to geodesics defined by Riemannian, Finsler, semi-Riemannian and magnetic structures on manifolds. It is an extended report on problem sessions held during the International Workshop on Geodesics in August 2010 at the Chern Institute of Mathematics in Tianjin.

Kifer, Peres, and Weiss proved in [A dimension gap for continued fractions with independent digits. Israel J. Math.124 (2001), 61–76] that there exists $c_{0}>0$, such that $\dim \unicode[STIX]{x1D707}\leq 1-c_{0}$ for any probability measure $\unicode[STIX]{x1D707}$, which makes the digits of the continued fraction expansion independent and identically distributed random variables. In this paper we prove that amongst this class of measures, there exists one whose dimension is maximal. Our results also apply in the more general setting of countable branched systems.

The purpose of this article is to study the relation between combinatorial equivalence and topological conjugacy, specifically how a certain type of combinatorial equivalence implies topological conjugacy. We introduce the concept of kneading sequences for a setting that is more general than one-dimensional dynamics: for the two-dimensional toy model family of Hénon maps introduced by Benedicks and Carleson, we define kneading sequences for their critical lines, and prove that these sequences are a complete invariant for a natural conjugacy class among the toy model family. We also establish a version of Singer’s theorem for the toy model family.

We introduce the notions ‘virtual automorphism group’ of a minimal flow and ‘semiregular flow’ and investigate the relationship between the virtual and actual group of automorphisms.

The topic of this course is the discrete subgroups of semisimple Lie groups. We discuss a criterion that ensures that such a subgroup is arithmetic. This criterion is a joint work with Sébastien Miquel, which extends previous work of Selberg and Hee Oh and solves an old conjecture of Margulis. We focus on concrete examples like the group $\mathrm {SL}(d,{\mathbb {R}})$ and we explain how classical tools and new techniques enter the proof: the Auslander projection theorem, the Bruhat decomposition, the Mahler compactness criterion, the Borel density theorem, the Borel–Harish-Chandra finiteness theorem, the Howe–Moore mixing theorem, the Dani–Margulis recurrence theorem, the Raghunathan–Venkataramana finite-index subgroup theorem and so on.

Fix an alphabet $A=\{0,1,\ldots ,M\}$ with $M\in \mathbb{N}$. The univoque set $\mathscr{U}$ of bases $q\in (1,M+1)$ in which the number $1$ has a unique expansion over the alphabet $A$ has been well studied. It has Lebesgue measure zero but Hausdorff dimension one. This paper describes how the points in the set $\mathscr{U}$ are distributed over the interval $(1,M+1)$ by determining the limit

$$\begin{eqnarray}f(q):=\lim _{\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FF}\rightarrow 0}\dim _{\text{H}}(\mathscr{U}\cap (q-\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FF},q+\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FF}))\end{eqnarray}$$

$q\in (1,M+1)$

$f(q)>0$

$q\in \overline{\mathscr{U}}\backslash \mathscr{C}$

$\mathscr{C}$

$f$

$\mathscr{U}$

$\mathscr{U}$

Von Neumann’s original proof of the ergodic theorem is revisited. A uniform convergence rate is established under the assumption that one can control the density of the spectrum of the underlying self-adjoint operator when restricted to suitable subspaces. Explicit rates are obtained when the bound is polynomial, with applications to the linear Schrödinger and wave equations. In particular, decay estimates for time averages of solutions are shown.

Higher-dimensional binary shifts of number-theoretic origin with positive topological entropy are considered. We are particularly interested in analysing their symmetries and extended symmetries. They form groups, known as the topological centralizer and normalizer of the shift dynamical system, which are natural topological invariants. Here, our focus is on shift spaces with trivial centralizers, but large normalizers. In particular, we discuss several systems where the normalizer is an infinite extension of the centralizer, including the visible lattice points and the k-free integers in some real quadratic number fields.

A well-known result in the area of dynamical systems asserts that any invertible hyperbolic operator on any Banach space is structurally stable. This result was originally obtained by Hartman in 1960 for operators on finite-dimensional spaces. The general case was independently obtained by Palis and Pugh around 1968. We will exhibit a class of examples of structurally stable operators that are not hyperbolic, thereby showing that the converse of the above-mentioned result is false in general. We will also prove that an invertible operator on a Banach space is hyperbolic if and only if it is expansive and has the shadowing property. Moreover, we will show that if a structurally stable operator is expansive, then it must be uniformly expansive. Finally, we will characterize the weighted shifts on the spaces $c_{0}(\mathbb{Z})$ and $\ell _{p}(\mathbb{Z})$ ($1\leq p<\infty$) that satisfy the shadowing property.

We consider closed orientable surfaces $S$ of genus $g>1$ and homeomorphisms $f:S\rightarrow S$ isotopic to the identity. A set of hypotheses is presented, called a fully essential system of curves $\mathscr{C}$ and it is shown that under these hypotheses, the natural lift of $f$ to the universal cover of $S$ (the Poincaré disk $\mathbb{D}$), denoted by $\widetilde{f},$ has complicated and rich dynamics. In this context, we generalize results that hold for homeomorphisms of the torus isotopic to the identity when their rotation sets contain zero in the interior. In particular, for $C^{1+\unicode[STIX]{x1D716}}$ diffeomorphisms, we show the existence of rotational horseshoes having non-trivial displacements in every homotopical direction. As a consequence, we found that the homological rotation set of such an $f$ is a compact convex subset of $\mathbb{R}^{2g}$ with maximal dimension and all points in its interior are realized by compact $f$-invariant sets and by periodic orbits in the rational case. Also, $f$ has uniformly bounded displacement with respect to rotation vectors in the boundary of the rotation set. This implies, in case where $f$ is area preserving, that the rotation vector of Lebesgue measure belongs to the interior of the rotation set.

We investigate the entropy for a class of upper semi-continuous set-valued functions, called Markov set-valued functions, that are a generalization of single-valued Markov interval functions. It is known that the entropy of a Markov interval function can be found by calculating the entropy of an associated shift of finite type. In this paper, we construct a similar shift of finite type for Markov set-valued functions and use this shift space to find upper and lower bounds on the entropy of the set-valued function.

We continue the study of Rokhlin entropy, an isomorphism invariant for probability-measure-preserving (p.m.p.) actions of countablegroups introduced in Part I [B. Seward. Krieger’s finite generator theorem for actions of countable groups I. Invent. Math. 215(1) (2019), 265–310]. In this paper we prove a non-ergodic finite generator theorem and use it to establish sub-additivity and semicontinuity properties of Rokhlin entropy. We also obtain formulas for Rokhlin entropy in terms of ergodic decompositions and inverse limits. Finally, we clarify the relationship between Rokhlin entropy, sofic entropy, and classical Kolmogorov–Sinai entropy. In particular, using Rokhlin entropy we give a new proof of the fact that ergodic actions with positive sofic entropy have finite stabilizers.

We consider the dynamics of complex rational maps on $\widehat{\mathbb{C}}$. We prove that, after reducing their orbits to a fixed number of positive values representing the Fubini–Study distances between finitely many initial elements of the orbit and the origin, ergodic properties of the rational map are preserved.

We study the asymptotic dynamics of piecewise-contracting maps defined on a compact interval. For maps that are not necessarily injective, but have a finite number of local extrema and discontinuity points, we prove the existence of a decomposition of the support of the asymptotic dynamics into a finite number of minimal components. Each component is either a periodic orbit or a minimal Cantor set and such that the $\unicode[STIX]{x1D714}$-limit set of (almost) every point in the interval is exactly one of these components. Moreover, we show that each component is the $\unicode[STIX]{x1D714}$-limit set, or the closure of the orbit, of a one-sided limit of the map at a discontinuity point or at a local extremum.

This survey describes the recent advances in the construction of Markov partitions for non-uniformly hyperbolic systems. One important feature of this development comes from a finer theory of non-uniformly hyperbolic systems, which we also describe. The Markov partition defines a symbolic extension that is finite-to-one and onto a non-uniformly hyperbolic locus, and this provides dynamical and statistical consequences such as estimates on the number of closed orbits and properties of equilibrium measures. The class of systems includes diffeomorphisms, flows, and maps with singularities.

Let G be a finite group, let A be an infinite-dimensional stably finite simple unital C*-algebra, and let $\alpha \colon G \to {\operatorname {Aut}} (A)$ be an action of G on A which has the weak tracial Rokhlin property. Let $A^{\alpha }$ be the fixed point algebra. Then the radius of comparison satisfies ${\operatorname {rc}} (A^{\alpha }) \leq {\operatorname {rc}} (A)$ and ${\operatorname {rc}} ( C^* (G, A, \alpha ) ) \leq ({1}/{{{\operatorname{card}}} (G))} \cdot {\operatorname {rc}} (A)$ . The inclusion of $A^{\alpha }$ in A induces an isomorphism from the purely positive part of the Cuntz semigroup ${\operatorname {Cu}} (A^{\alpha })$ to the fixed points of the purely positive part of ${\operatorname {Cu}} (A)$ , and the purely positive part of ${\operatorname {Cu}} ( C^* (G, A, \alpha ) )$ is isomorphic to this semigroup. We construct an example in which $G \,{=}\, {\mathbb {Z}} / 2 {\mathbb {Z}}$ , A is a simple unital AH algebra, $\alpha $ has the Rokhlin property, ${\operatorname {rc}} (A)> 0$ , ${\operatorname {rc}} (A^{\alpha }) = {\operatorname {rc}} (A)$ , and ${\operatorname {rc}} ({C^* (G, A, \alpha)} ) = ({1}/{2}) {\operatorname {rc}} (A)$ .

It is proved that a symplectic twist map of the cotangent bundle $T^{\ast }\mathbb{T}^{d}$ of the $d$-dimensional torus that is without conjugate points is $C^{0}$-integrable, that is  $T^{\ast }\mathbb{T}^{d}$ is foliated by a family of invariant $C^{0}$ Lagrangian graphs.

The Chirikov standard map is a prototypical example of a one-parameter family of volume-preserving maps for which one anticipates chaotic behavior on a non-negligible (positive-volume) subset of phase space for a large set of parameters. Rigorous analysis is notoriously difficult and it remains an open question whether this chaotic region, the stochastic sea, has positive Lebesgue measure for any parameter value. Here we study a problem of intermediate difficulty: compositions of standard maps with increasing coefficient. When the coefficients increase to infinity at a sufficiently fast polynomial rate, we obtain a strong law, a central limit theorem, and quantitative mixing estimates for Holder observables. The methods used are not specific to the standard map and apply to a class of compositions of ‘prototypical’ two-dimensional maps with hyperbolicity on ‘most’ of phase space.

In this article, we will prove a full topological version of Popa’s measurable cocycle superrigidity theorem for full shifts [Popa, Cocycle and orbit equivalence superrigidity for malleable actions of $w$-rigid groups. Invent. Math. 170(2) (2007), 243–295]. Let $G$ be a finitely generated group that has one end, undistorted elements and sub-exponential divergence function. Let $H$ be a target group that is complete and admits a compatible bi-invariant metric. Then, every Hölder continuous cocycle for the full shifts of $G$ with value in $H$ is cohomologous to a group homomorphism via a Hölder continuous transfer map. Using the ideas of Behrstock, Druţu, Mosher, Mozes and Sapir [Divergence, thick groups, and short conjugators. Illinois J. Math. 58(4) (2014), 939–980; Thick metric spaces, relative hyperbolicity, and quasi-isometric rigidity. Math. Ann. 344(3) (2009), 543–595; Divergence in lattices in semisimple Lie groups and graphs of groups. Trans. Amer. Math. Soc. 362(5) (2010), 2451–2505; Tree-graded spaces and asymptotic cones of groups. Topology 44(5) (2005), 959–1058], we show that the class of our acting groups is large including wide groups having undistorted elements and one-ended groups with strong thick of finite orders. As a consequence, irreducible uniform lattices of most of higher rank connected semisimple Lie groups, mapping class groups of $g$-genus surfaces with $p$-punches, $g\geq 2,p\geq 0$; Richard Thompson groups $F,T,V$; $\text{Aut}(F_{n})$, $\text{Out}(F_{n})$, $n\geq 3$; certain (two-dimensional) Coxeter groups; and one-ended right-angled Artin groups are in our class. This partially extends the main result in Chung and Jiang [Continuous cocycle superrigidity for shifts and groups with one end. Math. Ann. 368(3–4) (2017), 1109–1132].

Consider an ergodic Markov chain on a countable state space for which the return times have exponential tails. We show that the stationary version of any such chain is a finitary factor of an independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) process. A key step is to show that any stationary renewal process whose jump distribution has exponential tails and is not supported on a proper subgroup of ${\mathbb {Z}}$ is a finitary factor of an i.i.d. process.