We here show that the necessary condition of exponentially decaying first return times to a cylinder set is also sufficient for a countable state Markov chain to be almost continuously isomorphic to a Bernoulli shift.

We give a proof of Pesin entropy formula in a very general setting.

We study asymptotic growth of closed geodesies for various Riemannian metrics on a compact manifold which carries a metric of negative sectional curvature. Our approach makes use of both variational and dynamical description of geodesies and can be described as an asymptotic version of length-area method. We also obtain various inequalities between topological and measure-theoretic entropies of the geodesic flows for different metrics on the same manifold. Our method works especially well for any metric conformally equivalent to a metric of constant negative curvature. For a surface with negative Euler characteristics every Riemannian metric has this property due to a classical regularization theorem. This allows us to prove that every metric of non-constant curvature has strictly more close geodesies of length at most T for sufficiently large T then any metric of constant curvature of the same total area. In addition the common value of topological and measure-theoretic entropies for metrics of constant negative curvature with the fixed area separates the values of two entropies for other metrics with the same area.

The purpose of this note is to prove a conjecture of D. Sullivan that when the Julia set J of a rational function f is hyperbolic, the Hausdorff dimension of J depends real analytically on f. We shall obtain this as corollary of a general result on repellers of real analytic maps (see corollary 5).

We consider diffeomorphisms of surfaces leaving invariant an ergodic Borel probability measure μ. Define HD (μ) to be the infimum of Hausdorff dimension of sets having full μ-measure. We prove a formula relating HD (μ) to the entropy and Lyapunov exponents of the map. Other classical notions of fractional dimension such as capacity and Rényi dimension are discussed. They are shown to be equal to Hausdorff dimension in the present context.

It is known that for any sequence X1, X2…, of identically distributed independent random matrices with a common distribution μ. the limit

exists with probability 1. We study some conditions under which Λ(μk)→Λ(μ) provided μk → μ in the weak sense.

There is a theorem of Sarkovskii which characterizes the sets of periods of periodic points for continuous maps of an interval into itself. We give a similar characterization for continuous maps of degree one of a circle into itself.

We consider perturbations of certain transitive maps of an interval into itself and estimate how far from the transitivity the perturbed maps are. The distance turns out not to be of greater order than the square of the size of the perturbation.

It is shown that for n ≥ 3 the Lebesgue measure is the unique finitely-additive isometry-invariant measure on the ring of bounded Lebesgue measurable subsets of the n-dimensional Euclidean space.

Consider the billiard ball problem in an open, convex, bounded region of the plane whose boundary is C2 and has at least one point of zero curvature. Then there are trajectories which come arbitrarily close to being positively tangent to the boundary and also come arbitrarily close to being negatively tangent to the boundary.

Consider an analytic differential equation ο = adx + bdy with an algebraically isolated singularity and without a separatrix. The germ at 0∈ℝ2 of the 1-jet y dy is either a focus or a centre. The equation has C∞ normal form of the type = with F(x) = F(−x) if and only if the germ is a centre.

We give an example of a smooth map of an interval into itself, conjugate to the Feigenbaum map, for which the attracting Cantor set has positive Lebesgue measure.

We consider iterates of absolutely continuous measures concentrated in a neighbourhood of a partially hyperbolic attractor. It is shown that limit points can be measures which have conditional measures of a special form for any partition into subsets of unstable manifolds.

We find very simple examples of C∞-arcs of diffeomorphisms of the two-dimensional torus, preserving the Lebesgue measure and having the following properties: (1) the beginning of an arc is inside the set of Anosov diffeomorphisms; (2) after the bifurcation parameter every diffeomorphism has an elliptic fixed point with the first Birkhoff invariant non-zero (the KAM situation) and an invariant open area with almost everywhere non-zero Lyapunov characteristic exponents, moreover where the diffeomorphism has Bernoulli property; (3) the arc is real-analytic except on two circles (for each value of parameter) which are inside the Bernoulli property area.

We classify up to an isomorphism all factors of the classical horocycle flow on the unit tangent bundle of a surface of constant negative curvature with finite volume.

Sullivan's geometric measure on a geometrically finite hyperbolic manifold is shown to satisfy a mean ergodic theorem on horospheres and through this that the geodesic flow is Bernoulli.