We investigate a certain dual relationship between piecewise rotations of a circle and interval exchange maps. In 2005, Cruz and da Rocha [A generalization of the Gauss map and some classical theorems on continued fractions. Nonlinearity18 (2005), 505–525]  introduced a notion of ‘castles’ arising from piecewise rotations of a circle. We extend their idea and introduce a continuum version of castles, which we show to be equivalent to Veech’s zippered rectangles [Gauss measures for transformations on the space of interval exchange maps. Ann. of Math. (2) 115 (1982), 201–242]. We show that a fairly natural map defined on castles represents the inverse of the natural extension of the Rauzy map.

Let f be a smooth symplectic diffeomorphism of ${\mathbb R}^2$ admitting a (non-split) separatrix associated to a hyperbolic fixed point. We prove that if f is a perturbation of the time-1 map of a symplectic autonomous vector field, this separatrix is accumulated by a positive measure set of invariant circles. However, we provide examples of smooth symplectic diffeomorphisms with a Lyapunov unstable non-split separatrix that are not accumulated by invariant circles.

In this paper, we first discuss some connections between template theory and the description of basic sets of Smale flows on 3-manifolds due to F. Béguin and C. Bonatti. The main tools we use are symbolic dynamics, template moves and some combinatorial surgeries. Secondly, we obtain some relationship between the surgeries and the number of S1×S2 factors of M for a non-singular Smale flow on a given closed orientable 3-manifold M. We also prove that any template T can model a basic set Λ of a non-singular Smale flow on nS1×S2 for some positive integer n.

We define a random iterated function system (RIFS) to be a finite set of (deterministic) iterated function systems (IFSs) acting on the same metric space. For a given RIFS, there exists a continuum of random attractors corresponding to each sequence of deterministic IFSs. Much work has been done on computing the ‘almost sure’ dimensions of these random attractors. Here we compute the typical dimensions (in the sense of Baire) and observe that our results are in stark contrast to those obtained using the probabilistic approach. Furthermore, we examine the typical Hausdorff and packing measures of the random attractors and give examples to illustrate some of the strange phenomena that can occur. The only restriction we impose on the maps is that they are bi-Lipschitz and we obtain our dimension results without assuming any separation conditions.

We define a notion of substitution on colored binary trees that we call substreetution. We show that a point fixed by a substreetution may (or not) be almost periodic, and thus the closure of the orbit under the $\mathbb {F}_{2}^{+}$-action may (or not) be minimal. We study one special example: we show that it belongs to the minimal case and that the number of preimages in the minimal set increases just exponentially fast, whereas it could be expected a super-exponential growth. We also give examples of periodic trees without invariant measures on their orbit. We use our construction to get quasi-periodic colored tilings of the hyperbolic disk.

A parameter $c_{0}\in {\mathbb {C}}$ in the family of quadratic polynomials $f_{c}(z)=z^{2}+c$ is a critical point of a period n multiplier if the map $f_{c_{0}}$ has a periodic orbit of period n, whose multiplier, viewed as a locally analytic function of c, has a vanishing derivative at $c=c_{0}$ . We study the accumulation set ${\mathcal X}$ of the critical points of the multipliers as $n\to \infty $ . This study complements the equidistribution result for the critical points of the multipliers that was previously obtained by the authors. In particular, in the current paper, we prove that the accumulation set ${\mathcal X}$ is bounded, connected, and contains the Mandelbrot set as a proper subset. We also provide a necessary and sufficient condition for a parameter outside of the Mandelbrot set to be contained in the accumulation set ${\mathcal X}$ and show that this condition is satisfied for an open set of parameters. Our condition is similar in flavor to one of the conditions that define the Mandelbrot set. As an application, we get that the function that sends c to the Hausdorff dimension of $f_{c}$ does not have critical points outside of the accumulation set ${\mathcal X}$ .

We study minimality for continuous actions of abelian semigroups on compact Hausdorff spaces with a free interval. First, we give a necessary and sufficient condition for such a space to admit a minimal action of a given abelian semigroup. Further, for actions of abelian semigroups we provide a trichotomy for the topological structure of minimal sets intersecting a free interval.

For a non-generic, yet dense subset of $C^{1}$ expanding Markov maps of the interval we prove the existence of uncountably many Lyapunov optimizing measures which are ergodic, fully supported and have positive entropy. These measures are equilibrium states for some Hölder continuous potentials. We also prove the existence of another non-generic dense subset for which the optimizing measure is unique and supported on a periodic orbit. A key ingredient is a new $C^{1}$ perturbation theorem which allows us to interpolate between expanding Markov maps and the shift map on a finite number of symbols.

We consider stationary ergodic processes indexed by or whose finite-dimensional marginals have laws which are absolutely continuous with respect to Lebesgue measure. We define an entropy theory for these continuous processes, prove an analogue of the Shannon–MacMillan–Breiman theorem and study more precisely the particular example of Gaussian processes.

A classic result due to Furstenberg is the strict ergodicity of the horocycle flow for a compact hyperbolic surface. Strict ergodicity is unique ergodicity with respect to a measure of full support, and therefore it implies minimality. The horocycle flow has been previously studied on minimal foliations by hyperbolic surfaces on closed manifolds, where it is known not to be minimal in general. In this paper, we prove that for the special case of Riemannian foliations, strict ergodicity of the horocycle flow still holds. This, in particular, proves that this flow is minimal, which establishes a conjecture proposed by Matsumoto. The main tool is a theorem due to Coudène, which he presented as an alternative proof for the surface case. It applies to two continuous flows defining a measure-preserving action of the affine group of the line on a compact metric space, precisely matching the foliated setting. In addition, we briefly discuss the application of Coudène’s theorem to other kinds of foliations.

We consider measure-preserving diffeomorphisms of the two-dimensional torus with zero entropy. We prove that every ergodic C^3-diffeomorphism f of the two-dimensional torus with linear growth of the derivative (i.e. the sequence \{n^{-1}Df^n\}_{n\in{\mathbb N}} is uniformly separated from 0 and \infty and it is bounded in the C^2-norm) is algebraically conjugate to a skew product of an irrational rotation on the circle and a circle C^3-cocycle with non-zero topological degree.

A classical result in ergodic theory says that there always exists a topological model for any factor map ${\it\pi}:(X,{\mathcal{X}},{\it\mu},T)\rightarrow (Y,{\mathcal{Y}},{\it\nu},S)$ of ergodic systems. That is, there are some topological factor map $\hat{{\it\pi}}:(\hat{X},\hat{T})\rightarrow ({\hat{Y}},{\hat{S}})$ and invariant measures $\hat{{\it\mu}}$, $\hat{{\it\nu}}$ such that the diagram

$$\begin{eqnarray}\displaystyle & & \displaystyle \nonumber\end{eqnarray}$$

${\it\phi}$

${\it\psi}$

$\hat{{\it\pi}}$

Let $Q$ be a closed manifold admitting a locally free action of a compact Lie group $G$. In this paper, we study the properties of geodesic flows on $Q$ given by suitable G-invariant Riemannian metrics. In particular, we will be interested in the existence of geodesics that are closed up to the action of some element in the group $G$, since they project to closed magnetic geodesics on the quotient orbifold $Q/G$.

Given a periodic point ${\it\omega}$ in a ${\it\psi}$-mixing shift with countable alphabet, the sequence $\{S_{n}\}$ of random variables counting the number of multiple returns in shrinking cylindrical neighborhoods of ${\it\omega}$ is considered. Necessary and sufficient conditions for the convergence in distribution of $\{S_{n}\}$ are obtained, and it is shown that the limit is a Pólya–Aeppli distribution. A global condition on the shift system which guarantees the convergence in distribution of $\{S_{n}\}$ for every periodic point is introduced. This condition is used to derive results for $f$-expansions and Gibbs measures. Results are also obtained concerning the possible limit distribution of sub-sequences $\{S_{n_{k}}\}$. A family of examples in which there is no convergence is presented. We also exhibit an example for which the limit distribution is pure Poissonian.

On semiflows on Banach manifolds, Quandt (1988 and 1989) stated that some special semiflows were inverse limit stable. However, the concepts and proofs used to show inverse limit stability of semiflows are rough and ambiguous. We consider semiflows on finite-dimensional compact manifolds or on finite-dimensional compact non-singular branched manifolds. In this paper we show that more special semiflows are inverse limit stable. That is, Anosov semiflows are inverse limit stable.

We introduce the study of the local dynamics around a parabolic indifferent invariant curve for fibered holomorphic maps. As in the classical non-fibered case, we show that petals are the main ingredient. Nevertheless, one expects that the properties of the base rotation number should play an important role in the arrangement of the petals. We exhibit examples where the existence and the number of petals depend not just on the complex coordinate of the map, but on the base rotation number. Furthermore, under additional hypotheses on the arithmetic and smoothness of the map, we present a theorem that allows a characterization of the local dynamics around a parabolic invariant curve.

We consider the problem of the asymptotic size of the random maximum-weight matching of a sparse random graph, which we translate into dynamics of the operator in the space of distribution functions. A tight condition for the uniqueness of the globally attracting fixed point is provided, which extends the result of Karp and Sipser [Maximum matchings in sparse random graphs. 22nd Ann. Symp. on Foundations of Computer Science (Nashville, TN, 28–30 October, 1981). IEEE, New York, 1981, pp. 364–375] from deterministic weight distributions (Dirac measures μ) to general ones. Given a probability measure μ which corresponds to the weight distribution of a link of a random graph, we form a positive linear operator Φμ (convolution) on distribution functions and then analyze a family of its exponents, with parameter λ, which corresponds to the connectivity of a sparse random graph. The operator 𝕋 relates the distribution F on the subtrees to the distribution 𝕋F on the node of the tree by 𝕋F=exp (−λΦμF). We prove that for every probability measure μ and every λ<e, there exists a unique globally attracting fixed point of the operator; the probability measure corresponding to this fixed point can then be used to compute the expected maximum-weight matching on a sparse random graph. This result is called the e-cutoff phenomenon. For deterministic distributions and λ>e, there is no fixed point attractor. We further establish that the uniqueness of the invariant measure of the underlying operator is not a monotone property of the average connectivity; this parallels similar non-monotonicity results in the statistical physics context.

Let A be a unital simple -algebra of real rank zero. Given an isomorphismγ1:K1(A)→K1(A), we show that there is an automorphism α:A→A such that α*1=γ1 and α has the tracial Rokhlin property. Consequently, the crossed product is a simple unital AH-algebra with real rank zero. We also show that automorphisms with the Rokhlin property can be constructed from minimal homeomorphisms on a connected compact metric space.

One can describe isomorphism of two compact hyperbolic Riemann surfaces of the same genus by a measure-theoretic property: a chosen isomorphism of their fundamental groups corresponds to a homeomorphism on the boundary of the Poincaré disc that is absolutely continuous for Lebesgue measure if and only if the surfaces are isomorphic. In this paper, we find the corresponding statement for Mumford curves, a non-Archimedean analogue of Riemann surfaces. In this case, the mere absolute continuity of the boundary map (for Schottky uniformization and the corresponding Patterson–Sullivan measure) only implies isomorphism of the special fibers of the Mumford curves, and the absolute continuity needs to be enhanced by a finite list of conditions on the harmonic measures on the boundary (certain non-Archimedean distributions constructed by Schneider and Teitelbaum) to guarantee an isomorphism of the Mumford curves. The proof combines a generalization of a rigidity theorem for trees due to Coornaert, the existence of a boundary map by a method of Floyd, with a classical theorem of Babbage, Enriques and Petri on equations for the canonical embedding of a curve.

We consider a construction of ${C}^{\ast } $-algebras from continuous piecewise monotone maps on the circle which generalizes the crossed product construction for homeomorphisms and more generally the construction of Renault, Deaconu and Anantharaman-Delaroche for local homeomorphisms. Assuming that the map is surjective and not locally injective we give necessary and sufficient conditions for the simplicity of the ${C}^{\ast } $-algebra and show that it is then a Kirchberg algebra. We provide tools for the calculation of the $K$-theory groups and turn them into an algorithmic method for Markov maps.