24th Nordic and 1st Franco-Nordic Congress of Mathematicians

Dynamics of isometries

Anders Karlsson, Kungliga tekniska högskolan, Stockholm, Sweden

Abstract
We provide an analysis of the dynamics of groups of isometries of metric spaces. Certain subsets, called stars, of a given boundary at infinity play a fundamental role and give rise to an incidence geometry (related to Tits geometries, face lattices, curve complexes, etc.). The stars can be completely identified for the standard boundaries of CAT(0)-spaces, Gromov hyperbolic spaces, Hilbert geometries, certain pseudoconvex domains, and partially determined for Thurston's boundary of Teichmuller spaces. A metric Furstenberg lemma as well as some new results and aspects of boundary theory of random walks, groups acting on CAT(0)-spaces, L2 cohomology, and dynamics of holomorphic maps will be discussed.