Stable accessibility of partially hyperbolic systems is central to their stable ergodicity, and we establish its $C^1$ -density among partially hyperbolic flows, as well as in the categories of volume-preserving, symplectic, and contact partially hyperbolic flows. As applications, we obtain on one hand in each of these four categories of flows the $C^1$ -density of the $C^1$ -stable topological transitivity and triviality of the centralizer, and on the other hand the $C^1$ -density of the $C^1$ -stable K-property of the natural volume in the latter three categories.

We outline a personal, professional, and scientific biography of Anatole Katok.

We prove a normal form for strong magnetic fields on a closed, oriented surface and use it to derive two dynamical results for the associated flow. First, we show the existence of invariant tori and trapping regions provided a natural non-resonance condition holds. Second, we prove that the flow cannot be Zoll unless (i) the Riemannian metric has constant curvature and the magnetic function is constant, or (ii) the magnetic function vanishes and the metric is Zoll. We complement the second result by exhibiting an exotic magnetic field on a flat two-torus yielding a Zoll flow for arbitrarily weak rescalings.

We develop the notion of the Rokhlin dimension for partial actions of finite groups, extending the well-established theory for global systems. The partial setting exhibits phenomena that cannot be expected for global actions, usually stemming from the fact that virtually all averaging arguments for finite group actions completely break down for partial systems. For example, fixed point algebras and crossed products are not in general Morita equivalent, and there is in general no local approximation of the crossed product $A\rtimes G$ by matrices over A. Using decomposition arguments for partial actions of finite groups, we show that a number of structural properties are preserved by formation of crossed products, including finite stable rank, finite nuclear dimension, and absorption of a strongly self-absorbing $C^*$ -algebra. Some of our results are new even in the global case.

We also study the Rokhlin dimension of globalizable actions: while in general it differs from the Rokhlin dimension of its globalization, we show that they agree if the coefficient algebra is unital. For topological partial actions on spaces of finite covering dimension, we show that finiteness of the Rokhlin dimension is equivalent to freeness, thus providing a large class of examples to which our theory applies.

For arbitrary closed countable subsets Z of the unit circle examples of topologically mixing operators on Hilbert spaces are given which have a densely spanning set of eigenvectors with unimodular eigenvalues restricted to Z. In particular, these operators cannot be ergodic in the Gaussian sense.

We prove that uniform hyperbolicity is invariant under topological conjugacy for dissipative polynomial automorphisms of $\mathbb {C}^2$ . Along the way we also show that a sufficient condition for hyperbolicity is that local stable and unstable manifolds of saddle points have uniform geometry.

Given any smooth Anosov map, we construct a Banach space on which the associated transfer operator is quasi-compact. The peculiarity of such a space is that, in the case of expanding maps, it reduces exactly to the usual space of functions of bounded variation which has proved to be particularly successful in studying the statistical properties of piecewise expanding maps. Our approach is based on a new method of studying the absolute continuity of foliations, which provides new information that could prove useful in treating hyperbolic systems with singularities.

We prove a number of results concerning the Hausdorff and packing dimension of sets of points which escape (at least in average) to infinity at a given rate under non-autonomous iteration of exponential maps. In particular, we generalize the results proved by Sixsmith in 2016 and answer his question on annular itineraries for exponential maps.

Let G be a Lie group, let $\Gamma \subset G$ be a discrete subgroup, let $X=G/\Gamma $ and let f be an affine map from X to itself. We give conditions on a submanifold Z of X that guarantee that the set of points $x\in X$ with f-trajectories avoiding Z is hyperplane absolute winning (a property which implies full Hausdorff dimension and is stable under countable intersections). A similar result is proved for one-parameter actions on X. This has applications in constructing exceptional geodesics on locally symmetric spaces and in non-density of the set of values of certain functions at integer points.

We show that there is a measure-preserving system $(X,\mathscr {B}, \mu , T)$ together with functions $F_0, F_1, F_2 \in L^{\infty }(\mu )$ such that the correlation sequence $C_{F_0, F_1, F_2}(n) = \int _X F_0 \cdot T^n F_1 \cdot T^{2n} F_2 \, d\mu $ is not an approximate integral combination of $2$ -step nilsequences.

We study the possible dynamical degrees of automorphisms of the affine space $\mathbb {A}^n$ . In dimension $n=3$ , we determine all dynamical degrees arising from the composition of an affine automorphism with a triangular one. This generalizes the easier case of shift-like automorphisms which can be studied in any dimension. We also prove that each weak Perron number is the dynamical degree of an affine-triangular automorphism of the affine space $\mathbb {A}^n$ for some n, and we give the best possible n for quadratic integers, which is either $3$ or $4$ .

Two given orbits of a minimal circle homeomorphism f are said to be geometrically equivalent if there exists a quasisymmetric circle homeomorphism identifying both orbits and commuting with f. By a well-known theorem due to Herman and Yoccoz, if f is a smooth diffeomorphism with Diophantine rotation number, then any two orbits are geometrically equivalent. It follows from the a priori bounds of Herman and Świątek, that the same holds if f is a critical circle map with rotation number of bounded type. By contrast, we prove in the present paper that if f is a critical circle map whose rotation number belongs to a certain full Lebesgue measure set in $(0,1)$ , then the number of equivalence classes is uncountable (Theorem 1.1). The proof of this result relies on the ergodicity of a two-dimensional skew product over the Gauss map. As a by-product of our techniques, we construct topological conjugacies between multicritical circle maps which are not quasisymmetric, and we show that this phenomenon is abundant, both from the topological and measure-theoretical viewpoints (Theorems 1.6 and 1.8).

We investigate to what extent a minimal topological dynamical system is uniquely determined by a set of return times to some open set. We show that in many situations, this is indeed the case as long as the closure of this open set has no non-trivial translational symmetries. For instance, we show that under this assumption, two Kronecker systems with the same set of return times must be isomorphic. More generally, we show that if a minimal dynamical system has a set of return times that coincides with a set of return times to some open set in a Kronecker system with translationarily asymmetric closure, then that Kronecker system must be a factor. We also study similar problems involving nilsystems and polynomial return times. We state a number of questions on whether these results extend to other homogeneous spaces and transitive group actions, some of which are already interesting for finite groups.

We investigate the location of zeros for the partition function of the anti-ferromagnetic Ising model, focusing on the zeros lying on the unit circle. We give a precise characterization for the class of rooted Cayley trees, showing that the zeros are nowhere dense on the most interesting circular arcs. In contrast, we prove that when considering all graphs with a given degree bound, the zeros are dense in a circular sub-arc, implying that Cayley trees are in this sense not extremal. The proofs rely on describing the rational dynamical systems arising when considering ratios of partition functions on recursively defined trees.

We improve a recent construction of Andrés Navas to produce the first examples of $C^2$ -undistorted diffeomorphisms of the interval that are $C^{1+\alpha }$ -distorted (for every ${\alpha < 1}$ ). We do this via explicit computations due to the failure of an extension to class $C^{1+\alpha }$ of a classical lemma related to the work of Nancy Kopell.

It is proved that each Gaussian cocycle over a mildly mixing Gaussian transformation is either a Gaussian coboundary or sharply weak mixing. The class of non-singular infinite direct products T of transformations $T_n$ , $n\in \mathbb N$ , of finite type is studied. It is shown that if $T_n$ is mildly mixing, $n\in \mathbb N$ , the sequence of Radon–Nikodym derivatives of $T_n$ is asymptotically translation quasi-invariant and T is conservative then the Maharam extension of T is sharply weak mixing. This technique provides a new approach to the non-singular Gaussian transformations studied recently by Arano, Isono and Marrakchi.

Let $g_0$ be a smooth pinched negatively curved Riemannian metric on a complete surface N, and let $\Lambda _0$ be a basic hyperbolic set of the geodesic flow of $g_0$ with Hausdorff dimension strictly smaller than two. Given a small smooth perturbation g of $g_0$ and a smooth real-valued function f on the unit tangent bundle to N with respect to g, let $L_{g,\Lambda ,f}$ (respectively $M_{g,\Lambda ,f}$ ) be the Lagrange (respectively Markov) spectrum of asymptotic highest (respectively highest) values of f along the geodesics in the hyperbolic continuation $\Lambda $ of $\Lambda _0$ . We prove that for generic choices of g and f, the Hausdorff dimensions of the sets $L_{g,\Lambda , f}\cap (-\infty , t)$ vary continuously with $t\in \mathbb {R}$ and, moreover, $M_{g,\Lambda , f}\cap (-\infty , t)$ has the same Hausdorff dimension as $L_{g,\Lambda , f}\cap (-\infty , t)$ for all $t\in \mathbb {R}$ .

Let $(X,T)$ be a topological dynamical system consisting of a compact metric space X and a continuous surjective map $T : X \to X$ . By using local entropy theory, we prove that $(X,T)$ has uniformly positive entropy if and only if so does the induced system $({\mathcal {M}}(X),\widetilde {T})$ on the space of Borel probability measures endowed with the weak* topology. This result can be seen as a version for the notion of uniformly positive entropy of the corresponding result for topological entropy due to Glasner and Weiss.

Under a suitable bunching condition, we establish that stable holonomies inside center-stable manifolds for $C^{1+\beta }$ diffeomorphisms are uniformly bi-Lipschitz and, in fact, $C^{1+\mathrm {H}\ddot{\rm o}\mathrm {lder}}$ . This verifies the ergodicity of suitably center-bunched, essentially accessible, partially hyperbolic $C^{1+\beta }$ diffeomorphisms and verifies that the Ledrappier–Young entropy formula holds for $C^{1+\beta }$ diffeomorphisms of compact manifolds.

Given a closed, orientable, compact surface S of constant negative curvature and genus $g \geq 2$ , we study the measure-theoretic entropy of the Bowen–Series boundary map with respect to its smooth invariant measure. We obtain an explicit formula for the entropy that only depends on the perimeter of the $(8g-4)$ -sided fundamental polygon of the surface S and its genus. Using this, we analyze how the entropy changes in the Teichmüller space of S and prove the following flexibility result: the measure-theoretic entropy takes all values between 0 and a maximum that is achieved on the surface that admits a regular $(8g-4)$ -sided fundamental polygon. We also compare the measure-theoretic entropy to the topological entropy of these maps and show that the smooth invariant measure is not a measure of maximal entropy.