Departmental Colloquium
Amie Wilkinson
University of Chicago
The "general case"
Abstract: In the early 1930's, the Ergodic theorems of von Neumann
and Birkhoff put Boltzmann's Ergodic Hypothesis in mathematical terms,
and the natural question was born: is ergodicity the "general case"
among conservative dynamical systems? Oxtoby and Ulam tackled this
question early on and showed that the answer to this question is "yes"
for continuous dynamical systems. The work of Kolmogorov, Arnol'd and
Moser beginning in the 1950's showed that the answer to this question
is "no" for $C^{\infty}$ dynamical systems. I will discuss recent work
with Artur Avila and Sylvain Crovisier that addresses what happens for
$C^1$ dynamical systems.
Friday September 21, 2012 at 3:00 PM in SEO 636