Topics in ergodic theory: Notes 1 Tim Austin
[email protected] http://www.math.brown.edu/ timaustin 1 Introduction In the first instance, a ‘dynamical system’ in mathematics is a mathematical object intended to capture the intuition of a ‘system’ in the real world that passes through some set of different possible ‘states’ as time passes. Although the origins of the subject lie in physical systems (such as the motion of the planets through different mutual positions, historically the first example to be considered), the mathematical study of these concepts encompasses a much broader variety of models arising in the applied sciences, ranging from the fluctuations in the values of different stocks in economics to the ‘dynamics’ of population sizes in ecology. The mathematical objects used to describe such a situation consist of some set X of possible ‘states’ and a function T : X −→ X specifying the (deterministic1) movement of the system from one state to the next. In order to make a useful model, one must endow the set X with at least a little additional structure and then assume that T respects that structure. Four popular choices, roughly in order of increasing specificity, are the following: • X a measurable space and T measurable — this is the setting of measurable dynamics; 1There are also many models in probability theory of ‘stochastic dynamics’, such as Markov processes for which T is replaced by a probability kernel, which is something akin to a ‘random- ized function’ – these lie outside the scope of this course. 1 • X a topological space and T continuous — topological dynamics; • X a smooth manifold and T a smooth map — smooth dynamics; • X a compact subset of C and T analytic — complex dynamics.