We prove that the hitting measure is singular with respect to the Lebesgue measure for random walks driven by finitely supported measures on cocompact, hyperelliptic Fuchsian groups. Moreover, the Hausdorff dimension of the hitting measure is strictly less than one. Equivalently, the inequality between entropy and drift is strict. A similar statement is proven for Coxeter groups.

We establish central limit theorems for an action of a group $G$ on a hyperbolic space $X$ with respect to the counting measure on a Cayley graph of $G$. Our techniques allow us to remove the usual assumptions of properness and smoothness of the space, or cocompactness of the action. We provide several applications which require our general framework, including to lengths of geodesics in geometrically finite manifolds and to intersection numbers with submanifolds.

We generalize a combinatorial formula of Douady from the main cardioid to other hyperbolic components H of the Mandelbrot set, constructing an explicit piecewise linear map which sends the set of angles of external rays landing on H to the set of angles of external rays landing on the real axis.

We define a family $\mathcal {B}(t)$ of compact subsets of the unit interval which provides a filtration of the set of numbers whose continued fraction expansion has bounded digits. We study how the set $\mathcal {B}(t)$ changes as the parameter t ranges in $[0,1]$ , and see that the family undergoes period-doubling bifurcations and displays the same transition pattern from periodic to chaotic behaviour as the family of real quadratic polynomials. The set $\mathcal {E}$ of bifurcation parameters is a fractal set of measure zero and Hausdorff dimension $1$ . The Hausdorff dimension of $\mathcal {B}(t)$ varies continuously with the parameter, and we show that the dimension of each individual set equals the dimension of the corresponding section of the bifurcation set $\mathcal {E}$ .

We consider for each $t$ the set $K(t)$ of points of the circle whose forward orbit for the doubling map does not intersect $(0,t)$, and look at the dimension function $\unicode[STIX]{x1D702}(t):=\text{H.dim}\,K(t)$. We prove that at every bifurcation parameter $t$, the local Hölder exponent of the dimension function equals the value of the function $\unicode[STIX]{x1D702}(t)$ itself. A similar statement holds for general expanding maps of the circle: namely, we consider the topological entropy of the map restricted to the survival set, and obtain bounds on its local Hölder exponent in terms of the value of the function.

We construct a countable family of open intervals contained in (0,1] whose endpoints are quadratic surds and such that their union is a full measure set. We then show that these intervals are precisely the monotonicity intervals of the entropy of α-continued fractions, thus proving a conjecture of Nakada and Natsui.