Lectures on fractal geometry and dynamics Michael Hochman∗ March 25, 2012 Contents 1 Introduction 2 2 Preliminaries 3 3 Dimension 3 3.1 A family of examples: Middle-α Cantor sets . 3 3.2 Minkowski dimension . 4 3.3 Hausdorff dimension . 9 4 Using measures to compute dimension 13 4.1 The mass distribution principle . 13 4.2 Billingsley's lemma . 15 4.3 Frostman's lemma . 18 4.4 Product sets . 22 5 Iterated function systems 24 5.1 The Hausdorff metric . 24 5.2 Iterated function systems . 26 5.3 Self-similar sets . 31 5.4 Self-affine sets . 36 6 Geometry of measures 39 6.1 The Besicovitch covering theorem . 39 6.2 Density and differentiation theorems . 45 6.3 Dimension of a measure at a point . 48 6.4 Upper and lower dimension of measures . 50 ∗Send comments to
[email protected] 1 6.5 Hausdorff measures and their densities . 52 1 Introduction Fractal geometry and its sibling, geometric measure theory, are branches of analysis which study the structure of \irregular" sets and measures in metric spaces, primarily d R . The distinction between regular and irregular sets is not a precise one but informally, k regular sets might be understood as smooth sub-manifolds of R , or perhaps Lipschitz graphs, or countable unions of the above; whereas irregular sets include just about 1 everything else, from the middle- 3 Cantor set (still highly structured) to arbitrary d Cantor sets (irregular, but topologically the same) to truly arbitrary subsets of R . d For concreteness, let us compare smooth sub-manifolds and Cantor subsets of R .