Activities This Week

A topological dynamical system is said to be Bohr chaotic if for any bounded sequence it possesses a continuous function that correlates with the sequence when evaluated along some orbit. The theme of the lecture will be the relation of this property to an abundance of invariant measures of the system.

The study of aperiodic order and mathematical models of quasicrystals is concerned with ways in which disordered structures can nevertheless manifest aspects of order. In the talk I will describe examples such as the aperiodic Penrose and pinwheel tilings, together with several geometric, functional, dynamical and spectral properties that enable us to measure how far such constructions are from demonstrating lattice-like behavior. A particular focus will be given to new results on multiscale substitution tilings, a class of tilings that was recently introduced jointly with Yaar Solomon.

בחבורות טופולוגיות רבות מתגלה תופעה מפתיעה: יש מחלקת צמידות אחת הרבה יותר גדולה מכל השאר (למשל במובן משפט הקטגוריה של בייר). נראה שלתופעה זו יש מסקנות אלגבריות חזקות ומפתיעות.

Let X be a ramified cover of an abelian variety A over a number field k. According to Lang’s conjecture, the k-rational points of X should not be dense. In joint work with Corvaja, Demeio, Lombardo, and Zannier, we prove a slightly weaker statement. Namely, assuming A(k) is dense, we show that the complement of the image of X(k) in A(k) is (still) dense, i.e., there are less points on X than there are on A (or: there are more points on A than on X). In this talk I will explain how our proof relies on interpreting this as a special case of a version of Hilbert’s irreducibility theorem for abelian varieties.