Ergodic properties of folding maps on spheres (Q525511)

The paper contributes to the reconstruction of full radial symmetry from partial information. The authors consider a family of piecewise isometries that fold the sphere across a hyperplane onto a hemisphere, label a folding map by the unit vector in the direction of the target hemisphere, and consider sequences of such maps indexed by a given set of directions \(G\subset {\mathbb S}^{d-1}\). The principal aim is to answer the question: when can a dense subset of points in \({\mathbb S}^{d-1}\) be reached from an arbitrary starting position by applying folding maps with directions chosen from \(G\)? It turns out that a pair of obvious necessary conditions on the set of directions -- one geometric and one algebraic -- is sufficient. If a set of directions meets the conditions, then the only functions on \({\mathbb R}^d\) that increase under composition with each of the corresponding folding maps are radial. Furthermore, the random walk generated by randomly alternating maps is uniquely ergodic. The invariant measure gives positive measure to all non-empty open subsets, but does not agree, in general, with the uniform measure on \({\mathbb S}^{d-1}\).