Scientific

This is a slightly expanded version of a talk given at the Workshop on Aperiodic Order, held in Victoria, B.C. in August, 2002. The general subject of the talk was the densest packings of simple bodies, for instance spheres or polyhedra, in Euclidean or hyperbolic spaces, and describes recent joint work with Lewis Bowen. One of the main points was to report on our solution of the old problem of treating optimally dense packings of bodies in hyperbolic spaces. The other was to describe the general connection between aperiodicity and nonuniqueness in problems of optimal density.

In the present talk we focus on the ergodic behavior of systems of interacting diffusions.

This series of six lectures is intended for a general audience. The aim of the lectures is to survey the theory of torsions of 3-dimensional manifolds. The torsions were introduced by Kurt Reidemeister in 1935 to give a topological classification of lens spaces. Recent interest in torsions is due to their connections with the Seiberg-Witten invariants of 4-manifolds and the Floer-type homology of 3-manifolds. The lectures will cover the above topics.

In these notes we first offer an overview of two core areas in the dynamics of probability measure preserving systems, the Kolmogorov-Sinai theory of entropy and the theory of orbit equivalence. Entropy is a nontrivial invariant that, said simply, measures the exponential growth rate of the number of orbits in a dynamical system, a very rough measure of the complexity of the orbit structure. On the other hand, the core theorem of the orbit theory of these systems, due to Henry Dye, says that any two free and ergodic systems are orbit equivalent, that is to say can be regarded as sitting on the same set of orbits. The goal we set out to reach now is to explain and understand the seeming conflict between these two notions.

Homological theory of the “algebras in analysis” exists in at least three different versions. First of all, there is the homological theory of Banach and more general locally convex algebras. This is about 40 years old. However, in the last decade of the previous century, a “homological section” appeared in a new branch of analysis, the so-called quantized functional analysis or, more prosaically, the theory of operator spaces. One of principal features of this theory, as is now widely realized, is the existence of different approaches to the proper quantum version of a bounded bilinear operator. In fact, two such versions are now thought to be most important; each of them has its own relevant tensor product with an appropriate universal property. Accordingly, there are two principal versions of quantized algebras and quantized modules, and this leads to two principal versions of quantized homology.

Thus we have now, in the first decade of the 21st century, three species of topological homology: the traditional (or “classical”) one, and two “quantized” ones.

In these lectures, we shall restrict ourselves by studying, in the framework of these three theories, the fundamental concept of a projective module. This concept is “primus inter pares” among the three recognized pillars of the science of homology: projectivity, injectivity, and flatness. It is this notion that is the cornerstone for every sufficiently developed homological theory, let it be in algebra, topology, or, as in these notes, in functional analysis.

Our initial definitions of projectivity do not go far away from their prototypes in abstract algebra. However, the principal results concern essentially functional-analytic objects. As we shall see, they have, as a rule, no purely algebraic analogues. Moreover,
some phenomena are strikingly different from what algebraists could expect, based on their experience.