Provides the first systematic study of geometry and topology of locally symmetric rank one manifolds and dynamics of discrete action of their fundamental groups. In addition to geometry and topology, this study involves several other areas of Mathematics – from algebra of varieties of groups representations and geometric group theory, to geometric analysis including classical questions from function theory.

The aim of the Expositions is to present new and important developments in pure and applied mathematics. Well established in the community over more than two decades, the series offers a large library of mathematical works, including several important classics. The volumes supply thorough and detailed expositions of the methods and ideas essential to the topics in question. In addition, they convey their relationships to other parts of mathematics. The series is addressed to advanced readers interested in a thorough study of the subject. Editorial Board Lev Birbrair, Universidade Federal do Ceará, Fortaleza, Brasil Walter D. Neumann, Columbia University, New York, USA Markus J. Pflaum, University of Colorado, Boulder, USA Dierk Schleicher, Jacobs University, Bremen, Germany Katrin Wendland, University of Freiburg, Germany Honorary Editor Victor P. Maslov, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russia Titles in planning include Yuri A. Bahturin, Identical Relations in Lie Algebras (2019) Yakov G. Berkovich, Lev G. Kazarin, and Emmanuel M. Zhmud', Characters of Finite Groups, Volume 2 (2019) Jorge Herbert Soares de Lira, Variational Problems for Hypersurfaces in Riemannian Manifolds (2019) Volker Mayer, Mariusz Urbański, and Anna Zdunik, Random and Conformal Dynamical Systems (2021) Ioannis Diamantis, Boštjan Gabrovšek, Sofia Lambropoulou, and Maciej Mroczkowski, Knot Theory of Lens Spaces (2021)

This book, first published in 2000, focuses on developments in the study of geodesic flows on homogenous spaces.

Robert J. Zimmer is best known in mathematics for the highly influential conjectures and program that bear his name. Group Actions in Ergodic Theory, Geometry, and Topology: Selected Papers brings together some of the most significant writings by Zimmer, which lay out his program and contextualize his work over the course of his career. Zimmer’s body of work is remarkable in that it involves methods from a variety of mathematical disciplines, such as Lie theory, differential geometry, ergodic theory and dynamical systems, arithmetic groups, and topology, and at the same time offers a unifying perspective. After arriving at the University of Chicago in 1977, Zimmer extended his earlier research on ergodic group actions to prove his cocycle superrigidity theorem which proved to be a pivotal point in articulating and developing his program. Zimmer’s ideas opened the door to many others, and they continue to be actively employed in many domains related to group actions in ergodic theory, geometry, and topology. In addition to the selected papers themselves, this volume opens with a foreword by David Fisher, Alexander Lubotzky, and Gregory Margulis, as well as a substantial introductory essay by Zimmer recounting the course of his career in mathematics. The volume closes with an afterword by Fisher on the most recent developments around the Zimmer program.

This volume contains a collection of survey and research articles from the special program and international conference on Dynamics and Numbers held at the Max-Planck Institute for Mathematics in Bonn, Germany in 2014. The papers reflect the great diversity and depth of the interaction between number theory and dynamical systems and geometry in particular. Topics covered in this volume include symbolic dynamics, Bratelli diagrams, geometry of laminations, entropy, Nielsen theory, recurrence, topology of the moduli space of interval maps, and specification properties.

This text is a rigorous introduction to ergodic theory, developing the machinery of conditional measures and expectations, mixing, and recurrence. Beginning by developing the basics of ergodic theory and progressing to describe some recent applications to number theory, this book goes beyond the standard texts in this topic. Applications include Weyl's polynomial equidistribution theorem, the ergodic proof of Szemeredi's theorem, the connection between the continued fraction map and the modular surface, and a proof of the equidistribution of horocycle orbits. Ergodic Theory with a view towards Number Theory will appeal to mathematicians with some standard background in measure theory and functional analysis. No background in ergodic theory or Lie theory is assumed, and a number of exercises and hints to problems are included, making this the perfect companion for graduate students and researchers in ergodic theory, homogenous dynamics or number theory.

In this partly expository work, a framework is developed for building exotic circle actions of certain classical groups. The authors give general combination theorems for indiscrete isometry groups of hyperbolic space which apply to Fuchsian and limit groups. An abundance of integer-valued subadditive defect-one quasimorphisms on these groups follow as a corollary. The main classes of groups considered are limit and Fuchsian groups. Limit groups are shown to admit large collections of faithful actions on the circle with disjoint rotation spectra. For Fuchsian groups, further flexibility results are proved and the existence of non-geometric actions of free and surface groups is established. An account is given of the extant notions of semi-conjugacy, showing they are equivalent. This book is suitable for experts interested in flexibility of representations, and for non-experts wanting an introduction to group representations into circle homeomorphism groups.