HOROWITZ SEMINAR

PROBABILITY, ERGODIC THEORY and DYNAMICAL SYSTEMS

On Monday January 2th in room 210, Schreiber Bldg., at 14:30

Tamar Ziegler (IAS, Princeton)

Configurations in sets of positive upper density in Rm.

abstract

We use ergodic theoretic tools to solve a classical problem in geometric Ramsey theory. Let E be a measurable subset of Rm, with positive upper density. Let V = { 0, v1,...,vk } be a subset of Rm. We show that for r large enough, we can find an isometric copy of rV arbitrarily close to E. This is a generalization of a theorem of Furstenberg, Katznelson and Weiss showing a similar property for m = k = 2.