Equidistribution of orbits of isometries on compact Riemannian manifolds (Q2221489)

The question of the uniform distribution of orbits of semigroups of isometries on Riemannian manifolds dates back to \textit{H. Weyl} [Rend. Circ. Mat. Palermo 30, 377--407 (1910; JFM 41.0528.02)], whose theorem on the equidistribution on \(\mathbb{R}/\mathbb{Z}\) of the arithmetic progressions \(\{n\theta\}_{n\in\mathbb{N}}\) for \(\theta\) irrational is to be seen as the equidistribution of the orbits of the semigroup generated by the rotation of angle \(2\pi\theta\) radians on the circumference \(S_{1}=\mathbb{R}/\mathbb{Z}\). \textit{V. I. Arnol'd} and \textit{A. L. Krylov} [Sov. Math., Dokl. 4, 1--5 (1963; Zbl 0237.34008); translation from Dokl. Akad. Nauk SSSR 148, 9--12 (1963)] made use of a different notion of equidistribution some decades later to study the orbits on a sphere \(S_{2}\) of the semigroup generated by two rotations \(A,B\), assuring that, providing there exists a point \(x\in S_{2}\) whose orbit is dense, then this orbit is equidistributed. Very recently \textit{I. Stewart} [Extr. Math. 34, No. 1, 99--122 (2019; Zbl 1455.20028)] has observed that this theorem still holds with respect to the orbits of the semigroup generated by a finite number of reflections of \(\mathbb{R}^{3}\). This paper considers the action of a finitely generated semigroup \(S\) of isometries on a compact Riemannian manifold, establishing Theorem. If there is a dense orbit, then every orbit is equidistributed in the sense that, for any point \(x\in X\) and for any system of generators \(S=(a_{0}=1,a_{1},\dots,a_{r})\), we have \[ \lim_{n\rightarrow\infty}\,\frac{1}{( r+1) ^{n}}\sum_{i_{1},\dots,i_{n}=0}^{r}f( a_{i_{n}}\dots a_{i_{1}}x)=\frac{1}{m(X)}\int_{X}fdm \] for any \(f\) in \(C( X)\), where \(m\) is the measure induced by a volume form.