Dynamics on an infinite surface with the lattice property

Seminar: 
Geometry & Topology
Event time: 
Friday, November 14, 2008 - 9:30am to Thursday, November 13, 2008 - 7:00pm
Location: 
431 DL
Speaker: 
Pat Hooper
Speaker affiliation: 
Northwestern
Event description: 

A translation surface is a surface built by gluing together Euclidean
polygons by translations. Fix n to be an integer larger than two.
Veech discovered that closed surfaces built by gluing together
finitely many regular n-gons has the so called lattice property which
implies surprising dynamical properties. (For instance the geodesic
flow on these surfaces is unique ergodic in almost every direction.)
We will build an infinite translation surface by taking a limit of
Veech’s examples as n goes to infinite. The limiting surface has the
lattice property, but is infinite in area and genus. We will discuss
the question of recurrence for two dynamical systems on this surface,
the geodesic flow and an automorphism group.

Special note: 
Note Friday meeting time!