Effective versions of Ratner’s equidistribution theorem

 I will talk about recent progress in the study of quantitative equidistribution of unipotent orbits in homogeneous spaces, namely, effective versions of Ratner’s equidistribution theorem. In particular, I will explain the main idea of my proof for unipotent orbits in SL(3,R)/SL(3,Z). The proof combines new ideas from harmonic analysis and incidence geometry. In particular, the quantitative behavior of unipotent orbits is closely related to a Kakeya model.