University of Minnesota, Minneapolis
June 22 26, 1998
All talks will be in EE/CS 3-180.
The conference will begin at 9am Monday, and end no later than 11:30am Friday.
There will be 3 lectures each day, at 9am, 10:30am and 2pm, except on Friday, when there will be no afternoon lecture.
Professor Zimmer will present 10 one-hour talks (at 9am and 2pm every day, except an extra talk at 10:30am Monday in place of 2pm Fri.).
We will have guest lectures at 10:30am on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday:
Tuesday: Hyman Bass, "A super-rigid non-lattice"
Wednesday: Ralf Spatzier, "Hyperbolicity and local and global rigidity of actions of semisimple Lie groups and their lattices"
Thursday: Vitaly Bergelson, "Polynomial versus exponential growth and the theory of multiple recurrence" (see abstract below)
A final talk may be added at 10:15am Friday, to end about 11am.
The number of lectures is intentionally being kept small in order to provide plenty of free time for informal discussions between the participants.
| 9am | 10:30am | 2pm | |
| Monday | Zimmer | Zimmer | Zimmer |
| Tuesday | Zimmer | Bass | Zimmer |
| Wednesday | Zimmer | Spatzier | Zimmer |
| Thursday | Zimmer | Bergelson | Zimmer |
| Friday | Zimmer | TBA? |
Abstract of Professor Bergelson's lecture
"Polynomial versus exponential growth and the theory of multiple
recurrence"
The talk will be mostly devoted to recent work with A.Leibman where we
show that the so called ergodic Roth theorem extends to a nilpotent situation,
whereas both Roth theorem and recurrence (may) fail when the involved
transformations
generate a solvable group of exponential growth. These results lead to
all kinds of interesting speculations and conjectures in which the dichotomy
between polynomial and exponential growth plays the crucial role. The
background
and motivation of these results will also be described.
(Last updated: June 18)