Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

The celebrated Hadwiger's theorem says that linear combinations of intrinsic volumes on convex sets are the only isometry invariant continuous valuations(i.e. finitely additive measures). On the other hand H. Weyl has extended intrinsic volumes beyond convexity, to Riemannian manifolds. We try to understand the continuity properties of this extension under theGromov-Hausdorff convergence (literally, there is no such continuityin general). First, we describe a new conjectural compactification of the set of all closed Riemannian manifolds with given upper bounds on dimensionand diameter and lower bound on sectional curvature. Points of thiscompactification are pairs: an Alexandrov space and a constructible(in the Perelman-Petrunin sense) function on it. Second, conjecturally all intrinsic volumes extend by continuity to this compactification. No preliminary knowledge of Alexandrov spaces will be assumed, though it will be useful.

It is anticipated that chaotic regimes (characterized by, e.g., sensitivity with respect to initial conditions and loss of memory) arise in a wide variety of dynamical systems, including those arising from the study of ensembles of gas particles and fluid mechanics. However, in most cases the problem of rigorously verifying asymptotic chaotic regimes is notoriously difficult. For volume-preserving systems (e.g., incompressible fluid flow or Hamiltonian systems), these issues are exemplified by coexistence phenomena: even in quite simple models which should be chaotic, e.g. the Chirikov standard map, completely opposite dynamical regimes (elliptic islands vs. hyperbolic sets) can be tangled together in phase space in a convoluted way.

Recent developments have indicated, however, that verifying chaos is tractable for systems subjected to a small amount of noise— from the perspective of modeling, this is not so unnatural, as the real world is inherently noisy. In this talk, I will discuss two recent results: (1) a large positive Lyapunov exponent for (extremely small) random perturbations of the Chirikov standard map, and (2) a positive Lyapunov exponent for the Lagrangian flow corresponding to various incompressible stochastic fluids models, including stochastic 2D Navier-Stokes and 3D hyperviscous Navier-Stokes on the periodic box. The work in this talk is joint with Jacob Bedrossian, Samuel Punshon-Smith, Jinxin Xue and Lai-Sang Young.