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.

In this survey we prove the sharpest results on the loss of Sobolev regularity for solutions of the cohomological equation for translation flows on translation surfaces, available to the methods developed by the author in Forni [Solutions of the cohomological equation for area-preserving flows on compact surfaces of higher genus. Ann. of Math. (2)146(2) (1997), 295–344] and Forni [Deviation of ergodic averages for area-preserving flows on surfaces of higher genus. Ann. of Math. (2)155(1) (2002), 1–103]. The paper was mostly written between 2005 and 2006 while the author was at the University of Toronto, Canada, and was posted on arXiv in July 2007 [Forni. Sobolev regularity of solutions of the cohomological equation. Preprint, 2007, arXiv:0707.0940v2]. In an updated introduction we describe our results, taking into account later work on the problem and relevant recent progress in the field of Teichmüller dynamics, interval exchange transformations and translation flows.

A domain exchange map (DEM) is a dynamical system defined on a smooth Jordan domain which is a piecewise translation. We explain how to use cut-and-project sets to construct minimal DEMs. Specializing to the case in which the domain is a square and the cut-and-project set is associated to a Galois lattice, we construct an infinite family of DEMs in which each map is associated to a Pisot–Vijayaraghavan (PV) number. We develop a renormalization scheme for these DEMs. Certain DEMs in the family can be composed to create multistage, renormalizable DEMs.

The field of descriptive combinatorics investigates to what extent classical combinatorial results and techniques can be made topologically or measure-theoretically well behaved. This paper examines a class of coloring problems induced by actions of countable groups on Polish spaces, with the requirement that the desired coloring be Baire measurable. We show that the set of all such coloring problems that admit a Baire measurable solution for a particular free action $\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FC}$ is complete analytic (apart from the trivial situation when the orbit equivalence relation induced by $\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FC}$ is smooth on a comeager set); this result confirms the ‘hardness’ of finding a topologically well-behaved coloring. When $\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FC}$ is the shift action, we characterize the class of problems for which $\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FC}$ has a Baire measurable coloring in purely combinatorial terms; it turns out that closely related concepts have already been studied in graph theory with no relation to descriptive set theory. We remark that our framework permits a wholly dynamical interpretation (with colorings corresponding to equivariant maps to a given subshift), so this article can also be viewed as a contribution to generic dynamics.

We improve a recent result by giving the optimal conclusion both to the frequent universality criterion and the frequent hypercyclicity criterion using the notion of $A$-densities, where $A$ refers to some weighted densities sharper than the natural lower density. Moreover, we construct an operator which is logarithmically frequently hypercyclic but not frequently hypercyclic.

This paper establishes a fundamental difference between $\mathbb{Z}$ subshifts of finite type and $\mathbb{Z}^{2}$ subshifts of finite type in the context of ergodic optimization. Specifically, we consider a subshift of finite type $X$ as a subset of a full shift $F$. We then introduce a natural penalty function $f$, defined on $F$, which is 0 if the local configuration near the origin is legal and $-1$ otherwise. We show that in the case of $\mathbb{Z}$ subshifts, for all sufficiently small perturbations, $g$, of $f$, the $g$-maximizing invariant probability measures are supported on $X$ (that is, the set $X$ is stably maximized by $f$). However, in the two-dimensional case, we show that the well-known Robinson tiling fails to have this property: there exist arbitrarily small perturbations, $g$, of $f$ for which the $g$-maximizing invariant probability measures are supported on $F\setminus X$.

Subshifts with property $(A)$ are constructed from a class of directed graphs. As special cases the Markov–Dyck shifts are shown to have property $(A)$. The semigroups that are associated to ${\mathcal{R}}$-graph shifts with Property $(A)$ are determined.

We study dynamical systems $(X,G,m)$ with a compact metric space $X$, a locally compact, $\unicode[STIX]{x1D70E}$-compact, abelian group $G$ and an invariant Borel probability measure $m$ on $X$. We show that such a system has a discrete spectrum if and only if a certain space average over the metric is a Bohr almost periodic function. In this way, this average over the metric plays, for general dynamical systems, a similar role to that of the autocorrelation measure in the study of aperiodic order for special dynamical systems based on point sets.

We construct an example of a fixed point free Anosov diffeomorphism of the plane, which is not topologically conjugate to a translation.

In this article, we calculate the Ellis semigroup of a certain class of constant-length substitutions. This generalizes a result of Haddad and Johnson [IP cluster points, idempotents, and recurrent sequences. Topology Proc.22 (1997) 213–226] from the binary case to substitutions over arbitrarily large finite alphabets. Moreover, we provide a class of counterexamples to one of the propositions in their paper, which is central to the proof of their main theorem. We give an alternative approach to their result, which centers on the properties of the Ellis semigroup. To do this, we also show a new way to construct an almost automorphic–isometric tower to the maximal equicontinuous factor of these systems, which gives a more particular approach than the one given by Dekking [The spectrum of dynamical systems arising from substitutions of constant length. Z. Wahrscheinlichkeitstheor. Verw. Geb.41(3) (1977/78) 221–239].