Ergodic theory and dynamical systems. Translated from the French by Reinie Erné (Q737190)

This textbook is addressed to graduate students as well as to researchers who are not experts in ergodic theory and theory of dynamical systems. For an introduction to the subject it is a very good modern source. At the same time, for specialists, this book will be interesting because, for example, it contains non-classical proofs of classical results, frequently using weak \(L_2\)-topology. The book consists of four chapters and the fifth chapter is devoted to additional theoretic material such as weak topology in Hilbert space (Cauchy-Schwarz inequality, Banach-Alaoglu and Banach-Saks theorems), conditional expectations with martingale convergence theorem, and measure-theory on topological spaces (density in \(L_p\) spaces, Oxtoby-Ulam theorem on inner regularity, Lusin theorem). All chapters of the book end with exercises (basic and more advanced) and comments. In the comments, the author gives additional links to important articles and monographs and informs the reader about open problems. There are many meaningful illustrations in the book. The first chapter of the book is devoted to fundamental ideas and notions of ergodic theory and discusses the mean and pointwise ergodic theorems, mixing and the Hopf argument on stable foliations. As illustrating examples the author considers shifts, multiplication by 2, toral endomorphisms and automorphisms, and flows on the quotients of \(\mathrm{PSL}_2(\mathbb{R})\). The second chapter is about notions of topological dynamics (transitivity, topological mixing, recurrence, nonwandering, conjugation) and presents method of linearization (hyperbolic fixed point theorem and Hartman-Grobman theorem). The author discusses a lot of illustrating examples. In the third chapter, the author guides the reader from definitions of entropy (generating partition, Rokhlin metric, Kolmogorov-Sinai theorem) to information theory (Rohklin formula, entropy for shifts and dilating transformations). Chapter 4 is devoted to ergodic decomposition. The author gives an easy-to-read presentation of Lebesgue spaces, measurable Stone-Weierstrass theorem, disintegration theorem, measurable partitions and algebras associated with partitions and factors. The Rokhlin correspondence theorem ends the chapter.