Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

A Penrose tiling is an example of an aperiodic tiling and its vertex set is an example of an aperiodic point set (sometimes known as a quasicrystal). There are higher rank dynamical systems associated with any aperiodic tiling or point set, and in many cases they define a uniquely ergodic action on a compact metric space. I will talk about the ergodic theory of these systems. In particular, I will state the results of an ongoing work with S. Schmieding on the deviations of ergodic averages of such actions for point sets, where cohomology plays a big role. I'll relate the results to the diffraction spectrum of the associated quasicrystals.

We develop a mathematical model for ultra-short pulse propagation in nonlinear metamaterials characterized by a weak Kerr-type nonlinearity in their dielectric response. The fundamental equation in the model is the short-pulse equation (SPE) which will be derived in frequency band gaps. We use a multi-scale ansatz to relate the SPE to the nonlinear Schroedinger equation, thereby characterizing the change of width of the pulse from the ultra short regime to the classical slow varying envelope approximation. We will discuss families of solutions of the SPE in characteristic coordinates, as well as discussing the global wellposedness of generalizations of the model that describe uni- and bi-directional nonlinear waves.

Given a holomorphic map of C^m to itself that fixes a point, what happens to points near that fixed point under iteration? Are there points attracted to (or repelled from) that fixed point and, if so, how? We are interested in understanding how a neighborhood of a fixed point behaves under iteration. In this talk, we will focus on maps tangent to the identity. In dimension one, the Leau-Fatou Flower Theorem provides a beautiful description of the behavior of points in a full neighborhood of a fixed point. This theorem from the early 1900s continues to serve as inspiration for this study in higher dimensions. In dimension 2 our picture of a full neighborhood of a fixed point is still being constructed, but we will discuss some results on what is known, focusing on the existence of a domain of attraction whose points converge to that fixed point.

In this talk, we will discuss a question posed by Vladimir Arnold some twenty years ago, in a subject he called "dynamics of intersections." In the simplest setting, the question is the following: given a (discrete time) holomorphic dynamical system on a complex manifold X and two holomorphic curves C and D in X which pass through a fixed point P of the system, how quickly can the local intersection multiplicies at P of C with the iterates of D grow in time? Questions like this arise naturally, for instance, when trying to count the periodic points of a dynamical system. Arnold conjectured that this sequence of intersection multiplicities can grow at most exponentially fast, and in fact we can show this conjecture is true if the curves are chosen to be suitably generic. However, as we will see, for some (even very simple) dynamical systems one can choose curves so that the intersection multiplicities grow as fast as desired. We will see how to construct such counterexamples to Arnold's conjecture, using geometric ideas going back to work of Yoshikazu Yamagishi.