A function on a discrete group is weakly combable if its discrete derivative with respect to a combing can be calculated by a finite-state automaton. A weakly combable function is bicombable if it is Lipschitz in both the left- and right-invariant word metrics. Examples of bicombable functions on word-hyperbolic groups include:

1. (1) homomorphisms to ℤ;

2. (2) word length with respect to a finite generating set;

3. (3) most known explicit constructions of quasimorphisms (e.g. the Epstein–Fujiwara counting quasimorphisms).

In general, little is known about the exact topological structure of Julia sets containing a Cremer point. In this paper we show that there exist quadratic Cremer Julia sets of positive area such that for a full Lebesgue measure set of angles the impressions are degenerate, the Julia set is connected im kleinen at the landing points of these rays, and these points are contained in no other impression.

We present an analysis of one-dimensional models of dynamical systems that possess ‘coherent structures’: global structures that disperse more slowly than local trajectory separation. We study cocycles generated by expanding interval maps and the rates of decay for functions of bounded variation under the action of the associated Perron–Frobenius cocycles. We prove that when the generators are piecewise affine and share a common Markov partition, the Lyapunov spectrum of the Perron–Frobenius cocycle has at most finitely many isolated points. Moreover, we develop a strengthened version of the Multiplicative Ergodic Theorem for non-invertible matrices and construct an invariant splitting into Oseledets subspaces. We detail examples of cocycles of expanding maps with isolated Lyapunov spectrum and calculate the Oseledets subspaces, which lead to an identification of the underlying coherent structures. Our constructions generalize the notions of almost-invariant and almost-cyclic sets to non-autonomous dynamical systems and provide a new ensemble-based formalism for coherent structures in one-dimensional non-autonomous dynamics.

We study the action of the horocycle flow on the moduli space of abelian differentials in genus two. In particular, we exhibit a classification of a specific class of probability measures that are invariant and ergodic under the horocycle flow on the stratum ℋ(1,1).

We introduce the geodesic flow on the leaves of a holomorphic foliation with leaves of dimension one and hyperbolic, corresponding to the unique complete metric of curvature −1 compatible with its conformal structure. We do these for the foliations associated to Riccati equations, which are the projectivization of the solutions of linear ordinary differential equations over a finite Riemann surface of hyperbolic type S, and may be described by a representation ρ:π1(S)→GL(n,ℂ). We give conditions under which the foliated geodesic flow has a generic repeller–attractor statistical dynamics. That is, there are measures μ− and μ+ such that for almost any initial condition with respect to the Lebesgue measure class the statistical average of the foliated geodesic flow converges for negative time to μ− and for positive time to μ+ (i.e. μ+ is the unique Sinaï, Ruelle and Bowen (SRB)-measure and its basin has total Lebesgue measure). These measures are ergodic with respect to the foliated geodesic flow. These measures are also invariant under a foliated horocycle flow and they project to a harmonic measure for the Riccati foliation, which plays the role of an attractor for the statistical behaviour of the leaves of the foliation.

In this note, we obtain verifiable sufficient conditions for the extreme-value distribution for a certain class of skew-product extensions of non-uniformly hyperbolic base maps. We show that these conditions, formulated in terms of the decay of correlations on the product system and the measure of rapidly returning points on the base, lead to a distribution for the maximum of Φ(p)=−log(d(p,p0)) that is of the first type. In particular, we establish the type I distribution for S1 extensions of piecewise C2 uniformly expanding maps of the interval, non-uniformly expanding maps of the interval modeled by a Young tower, and a skew-product extension of a uniformly expanding map with a curve of neutral points.

In this paper, we introduce a C*-algebra associated with a primitive substitution. We show that when σ is proper, the C*-algebra is simple and purely infinite and contains the associated Cuntz–Krieger algebra and the crossed product C*-algebra of the corresponding Cantor minimal system. We calculate the K-groups.

Let K⊂ℝd be a self-similar or self-affine set and let μ be a self-similar or self-affine measure on it. Let 𝒢 be the group of affine maps, similitudes, isometries or translations of ℝd. Under various assumptions (such as separation conditions, or the assumption that the transformations are small perturbations, or that K is a so-called Sierpiński sponge) we prove theorems of the following types, which are closely related to each other.

• • (Non-stability) There exists a constant c<1 such that for every g∈𝒢 we have either μ(K∩g(K))<c⋅μ(K) or K⊂g(K).

• • (Measure and topology) For every g∈𝒢 we have μ(K∩g(K))>0⟺∫ K(K∩g(K))≠0̸ (where ∫ K is interior relative to K).

• • (Extension) The measure μ has a 𝒢-invariant extension to ℝd.

The repartition of dense orbits of lattices in the Euclidean plane were described by Ledrappier and Nogueira. We present here an elementary description of the gaps appearing in the experimentations. The main idea behind this description is to see the Euclidean plane as the space of (upper triangular) unipotent orbits in SL(2,ℝ). We conclude with the remark that this analysis may be carried on in much more general settings.

We introduce functional norms for hyperbolic Young towers which allow us to directly study the transfer operator on the full tower. By eliminating the need for secondary expanding towers commonly employed in this context, this approach simplifies and expands the analysis of this class of Markov extensions and the underlying systems for which they are constructed. As an example, we prove large-deviation estimates with a uniform rate function for a large class of non-invariant measures and show how to translate these to the underlying system.

An extended version of the ergodic closing lemma of Mañé is proved. As an application, we show that, C1 densely in the complement of the closure of Morse–Smale diffeomorphisms and those with a homoclinic tangency, there exists a weakly hyperbolic structure (dominated splittings with average hyperbolicity at almost every point on hyperbolic parts, and one-dimensional center direction when zero Lyapunov exponents are involved) over the supports of all non-atomic ergodic measures. As another application, we prove an approximation theorem, which claims that approximating the Lyapunov exponents of any non-atomic ergodic measure by those of an atomic ergodic measure by a C1 small perturbation is possible.

If there exists a diffeomorphism f on a closed, orientable n-manifold M such that the non-wandering set Ω(f) consists of finitely many orientable ( ±) attractors derived from expanding maps, then M is a rational homology sphere; moreover all those attractors are of topological dimension n−2. Expanding maps are expanding on (co)homologies.

A weighted substitution is a substitution that has weights associated with each occurrence of the substituted symbols. It defines a tiling space that admits the translation and scaling operators; the translation is the additive ℝ-action and the scaling is the multiplicative G-action, where G is a closed multiplicative subgroup of ℝ+. We obtained necessary and sufficient conditions for the additive action to be strongly mixing and for it to be weakly mixing.

We show by means of a counterexample that a C1+Lip diffeomorphism Hölder conjugate to an Anosov diffeomorphism is not necessarily Anosov. Also we include a result from the 2006 PhD thesis of Fisher: a C1+Lip diffeomorphism Hölder conjugate to an Anosov diffeomorphism is Anosov itself provided that Hölder exponents of the conjugacy and its inverse are sufficiently large.

We introduce a natural equivalence relation on the space ℋ0 of horofunctions of a word hyperbolic group that take the value 0 at the identity. We show that there are only finitely many ergodic measures that are invariant under this relation. This can be viewed as a discrete analog of the Bowen–Marcus theorem. Furthermore, if η is such a measure and G acts on a probability space (X,μ) by measure-preserving transformations then η×μ is virtually ergodic with respect to a natural equivalence relation on ℋ0×X. This is comparable to a special case of the Howe–Moore theorem. These results are applied to prove a new ergodic theorem for spherical averages in the case of a word hyperbolic group acting on a finite space.

In this paper we prove that the Poincaré map associated to a Lorenz-like flow has exponential decay of correlations with respect to Lipschitz observables. This implies that the hitting time associated to the flow satisfies a logarithm law. The hitting time τr(x,x0) is the time needed for the orbit of a point x to enter a ball Br(x0) centered at x0, with small radius r, for the first time. As the radius of the ball decreases to 0 its asymptotic behavior is a power law whose exponent is related to the local dimension of the physical measure at x0: for each x0 such that the local dimension dμ (x0) exists, holds for μ almost each x. In a similar way, it is possible to consider a quantitative recurrence indicator quantifying the speed of an orbit to come back to its starting point. Similar results hold for this recurrence indicator.

Let Γ be a dense subgroup of a simply connected nilpotent Lie group G generated by a finite symmetric set S. We consider the n-ball Sn for the word metric induced by S on Γ. We show that Sn (with uniform measure) becomes equidistributed on G with respect to the Haar measure as n tends to infinity. We also prove the analogous result for random walk averages.

We investigate algebraic properties of the automorphism group of multidimensional shifts of finite type (SFTs). We show that positive entropy implies that the automorphism group contains every finite group and, together with transitivity, implies that the center of the automorphism group is trivial (i.e. consists only of the shift action). We also show that positive entropy and dense minimal points (in particular, dense periodic points) imply that the automorphism group of X contains a copy of the automorphism group of the one-dimensional full shift, and hence contains non-trivial elements of infinite order. On the other hand we construct a mixing, positive-entropy SFT whose automorphism group is, modulo the shift action, a union of finite groups.

Let f:X→X be continuous and onto, where X is a compact metric space. Let be the inverse limit and F:Y →Y the induced homeomorphism. Suppose that μ is an f-invariant measure, and let m be the measure induced on Y by (μ,μ,…). We show that B is a basin of μ if and only if π−11(B) is a basin of m. From this it follows that if μ is an SRB measure for f on X, then the induced measure m on Y is an inverse-limit SRB measure for F. Conversely, if m is an inverse-limit SRB measure for F on Y, then the induced measure μ on X is an SRB measure for f.

We construct an infinite sequence of pseudo-Anosov homeomorphisms without fixed points and leaving invariant a sequence of orientable measured foliations on the same topological surface and the same stratum of the space of Abelian differentials. The existence of such a sequence shows that all pseudo-Anosov homeomorphisms fixing orientable measured foliations cannot be obtained by the Rauzy–Veech induction strategy.