HOROWITZ SEMINAR

PROBABILITY, ERGODIC THEORY and DYNAMICAL SYSTEMS


Monday, 28/12/2009, at 14:30 in: room 210, Schreiber Bldg.

Michael Hochman (Princeton)

will speak on

Non-expansive directions of Z2 actions


ABSTRACT:
A line L in the plane is expansive for a symbolic Z2 subshift if, for some r>0,
any two configurations which agree on an r-neighborhood of L must agree everywhere.

In a paper from 1995 Lind and Boyle studied the set of non-expansive directions of an action,
showing that it is closed and, for infinite subshifts, non-empty.
They also showed that any closed set of directions containing at least 2 points occurs in this way (this was proved for general Z2 actions).

The question of whether a system can have a single non-expansive direction (in a non-trivial way) has remained open for some time.
This question is related to the existence of cellular automata which act without equicontinuity points, but with sub-linear rate of "information propagation".
I will discuss the recent resolution of these questions.





To suggest a talk (yours, or someone elses), contact Jon. Aaronson: aaro at post dot tau dot ac dot il

Back to: Jon Aaronson's homepage.