No label defined (Q4511096)

The article is a survey of a part of ergodic theory intended for set theorists as well as for ergodic theorists. The aim is to illustrate with some examples the potential relevance of descriptive set theory to ergodic theory. It is focused primarily on the distinction between Borel and non-Borel sets. The content is organized (together with the introduction) into 11 sections. In Section 2, the author reviews some universal properties of the Baire and Cantor spaces, introduces Borel hierarchy, analytic and co-analytic sets and proves some basic closure properties of these pointclasses. Section 3 gives basic elements of the analysis of the structure of measure preserving transformations and connections with unitary operators and Polish groups. In Section 4 some examples of calculations of complexity are given to demonstrate how effective various results are. This is done for ergodic transformations, ergodic decompositions and Bernoulli shifts, weakly and strongly mixing transformations. The complexity of the relation of entropy to finite generators in Krieger's theorem is shown to be Borel while the effect of a result of Ornstein and Shields is that Kolmogorov automorphisms are quite complicated. Section 5 introduces Borel reducibility of equivalence relations. The dichotomy theorem between Vitali and smooth equivalence relations is proved. For a relation \(E\), \(E^+\) is defined by \(\langle x_n:n\in\omega\rangle E^+ \langle y_n:n\in\omega\rangle\) if and only if \(\forall n \exists m\) \(x_nEy_m\) and \(\forall n \exists m\) \(y_nEx_m\). The \(+\) operation is applied to the equality relation \(\mathit{Eq}\). The author proves that every Borel equivalence relation with countable classes is reducible to \(\mathit{Eq}^+\) and the isomorphism relation on the discrete spectrum transformations has the same complexity as \(\mathit{Eq}^+\). Section 6 introduces the notions of a complete \(\underset\sim\Pi^1_1\) set and a \(\underset\sim\Pi^1_1\)-norm and the structure of \(\underset\sim\Pi^1_1\) sets is explained. In Section 7 the conjugacy relation on the automorphism group is considered. Section 8 reviews the Furstenberg structure theorems for ergodic measure preserving transformations and states some basic ergodic theorems. Weak mixing is characterized in terms of eigenvalues and the compact functions are spanned by Hilbert-Schmidt operators with invariant kernel. The notions of compact and weak mixing are generalized. Section 9 is a discussion of Beleznay-Foreman's theorem saying that the class of measure distal transformations is a complete \(\underset\sim\Pi^1_1\) set and Section 10 describes the situation for topologically distal automorphisms. Section 11 is a list of several questions. For the entire collection see [Zbl 0940.00035].