A theorem on ergodicity of two-dimensional hyperbolic billiards (Q917112)

In the theory of dynamical systems with attractors there are a number of notions of dimension, e.g. the fractal dimension D, defined as the Hausdorff dimension of the attractor - and the information dimension \(\sigma\) and correlation dimension \(\nu\), the first being a purely geometrical notion, the last two incorporating the dynamics of the system. In a number of cases \(\nu\leq \sigma \leq D\) and even \(\nu =\sigma =D\). In this paper an example is given, that those notions of dimensions are not so closely related to each other, as it might seem, and that a thorough analysis of the dimensional structure of a dynamical system should be based on several different dimensional measures. The author constructs piecewise monotonic transformations \(T_{\gamma}\) of the unit interval depending on a parameter \(\gamma\) with \(0<\gamma <\) where \(\nu =2\gamma <\sigma =D=1\). Embedding this example into higher dimensions shows that two of those dimensional values can be driven apart as far as possible - i.e. up to the dimension of the phase space. All the necessary technical background for the proofs is outlined in the paper.