Wednesday, May 15th, 2019

Time: 2:00 p.m Place: Jeffery Hall 319

Speaker: Catherine Pfaff (Queen's University)

Title: Counting Conjugacy Classes: Groups Rebelling Against Dynamics.

Abstract: This talk will start with a gentle introduction to ways of viewing outer automorphisms of free groups and then will discuss joint work with Ilya Kapovich regarding counting conjugacy classes of these outer automorphisms. That is, inspired by results of Eskin and Mirzakhani counting closed geodesics of bounded length in the moduli space of a fixed closed surface, we consider a similar question in the Out(F_r) setting and discover bounds revealing behavior not present in the surface setting or in classical hyperbolic dynamical systems.

Friday, March 22nd, 2019

Time: 10:30 a.m Place: Jeffery Hall 102

Speaker: Alessandro Portaluri (University of Torino, Italy)

Title: Visiting Kepler with a couple of symplectic friends.

Abstract: Starting from the classical planar Kepler problem, by using the conservation law of the angular momentum, we reduce the problem to a one degree of freedom singular problem. Thanks to this reduction and after a suitable time scaling we show that, for negative energy, the orbit is an ellipse. Finally, by using a refined version of the Conley-Zehnder intersection index , we give a homotopic classification of all bounded motions.

Friday, October 5th, 2018

Time: 10:30 a.m Place: Jeffery Hall 422

Speaker: Francesco Cellarosi (Queen's University)

Title: Central Limit Theorem via spectral method

Abstract: I will explain the Nagaev-Guivarc'h method to obtain a Central Limit Theorem for sequences of random variables coming from a large class of 1-dimensional dynamical systems, namely uniformly expanding maps of the interval. The idea is work in a suitable Banach space to establish a spectral gap for the transfer operator, and then use a perturbative argument. This talk is based on a paper by Sébastien Gouëzel.

Friday, September 7th, 2018

Time: 10:30 a.m Place: Jeffery Hall 422

Speaker: Camille Horbez (Laboratoire de Mathématiques d’Orsay)

Title: Growth under automorphisms of hyperbolic groups

Abstract: Let G be a finitely generated group, let S be a finite generating set of G, and let f be an automorphism of G. A natural question is the following: what are the possible asymptotic behaviors for the length of f^n(g), written as a word in the generating set S, as n goes to infinity, and as g varies in the group G?

We investigate this question in the case where G is a torsion-free Gromov hyperbolic group. Growth was completely described by Thurston when G is the fundamental group of a hyperbolic surface, and can be understood from Bestvina-Handel’s work on train-tracks when G is a free group. We address the case of a general torsion-free hyperbolic group. We show in particular that every element g has a well-defined exponential growth rate under iteration of f, and that only finitely many exponential growth rates arise as g varies in G.

This is a joint work with Rémi Coulon, Arnaud Hilion and Gilbert Levitt.