Entropy and the uniform mean ergodic theorem for a family of sets (Q2826773)

The authors introduce the entropy of an infinite family \({\mathcal C} \) of measurable sets in a probability space and show that a family has zero entropy if and only if it is totally bounded under the symmetric difference semi-metric. The main result is that the mean ergodic theorem holds uniformly for \({\mathcal C} \) under every ergodic transformation if and only if \({\mathcal C} \) has zero entropy. When the entropy of \({\mathcal C} \) is positive, they establish a strong converse showing that the uniform mean ergodic theorem fails generically in every isomorphism class, including the isomorphism classes of Bernoulli transformations. As a corollary of these results, they establish that every strong mixing transformation is uniformly strong mixing on \({\mathcal C} \) if and only if the entropy of \({\mathcal C} \) is zero, and obtain a corresponding result for weak mixing transformations.