We introduce a notion of barycenter of a probability measure related to the symmetric mean of a collection of non-negative real numbers. Our definition is inspired by the work of Halász and Székely, who in 1976 proved a law of large numbers for symmetric means. We study the analytic properties of this Halász–Székely barycenter. We establish fundamental inequalities that relate the symmetric mean of a list of non-negative real numbers with the barycenter of the measure uniformly supported on these points. As consequence, we go on to establish an ergodic theorem stating that the symmetric means of a sequence of dynamical observations converge to the Halász–Székely barycenter of the corresponding distribution.

We consider cocycles of isometries on spaces of non-positive curvature $H$. We show that the supremum of the drift over all invariant ergodic probability measures equals the infimum of the displacements of continuous sections under the cocycle dynamics. In particular, if a cocycle has uniform sublinear drift, then there are almost invariant sections, that is, sections that move arbitrarily little under the cocycle dynamics. If, in addition, $H$ is a symmetric space, then we show that almost invariant sections can be made invariant by perturbing the cocycle.

We prove that if f is a C1-generic symplectic diffeomorphism then the Oseledets splitting along almost every orbit is either trivial or partially hyperbolic. In addition, if f is not Anosov then all the exponents in the centre bundle vanish. This establishes in full a result announced by Mañé at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 1983. The main technical novelty is a probabilistic method for the construction of perturbations, using random walks.

We show that, for any compact surface, there is a residual (dense G_{\delta}) set of C^{1} area-preserving diffeomorphisms which either are Anosov or have zero Lyapunov exponents a.e. This result was announced by R. Mañé, but no proof was available. We also show that for any fixed ergodic dynamical system over a compact space, there is a residual set of continuous SL(2,\mathbb{R})-cocycles which either are uniformly hyperbolic or have zero exponents a.e.