Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 August 2008
We introduce and study the notion of weak product recurrence. Two sufficient conditions for this type of recurrence are established. We deduce that any point with a dense orbit in either the full one-sided shift on a finite number of symbols or a mixing subshift of finite type is weakly product recurrent. This observation implies that distality does not follow from weak product recurrence. We have therefore answered, in the negative, a question posed by Auslander and Furstenberg.