Title: Ergodic methods in rigidity of representations
Speaker: Alex Furman (University of Illinois Chicago)
Abstract: A surface of genus at least two admits a variety of hyperbolic structures - the Teichmuller space. However, in higher dimensions similar locally symmetric structures turn out to be very rigid, as was shown by Weil, Selberg, Mostow, Margulis. Perhaps surprisingly, in addition to geometry, Lie groups, and number theory, some ideas from ergodic theory - dynamics on measure spaces - play an important role in these developments.
In the talk I will discuss some of these rigidity phenomena with the emphasis on the interplay between ergodic theory and algebraic groups.
Based on joint works with Uri Bader.
Biosketch: Alexander Furman earned his PhD at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem in 1996, under Benji Weiss. After that, he had postdocs at the University of Chicago and Penn State University, before joining the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he is now an LAS Distinguished Professor. He specializes in measurable group actions, and in particular, rigidity of group actions. His publications on this subject have appeared in Duke, Inventiones, JAMS, Acta, GAFA, the Annals, among others. He gave an invited lecture in 2014 at the ICM in Seoul.
Colloquium URL: https://web.math.osu.edu/colloquium/
