Reconstructing a minimal topological dynamical system from a set of return times

We investigate to what extent a minimal topological dynamical system is uniquely determined by a set of return times to some open set. We show that in many situations, this is indeed the case as long as the closure of this open set has no non-trivial translational symmetries. For instance, we show that under this assumption, two Kronecker systems with the same set of return times must be isomorphic. More generally, we show that if a minimal dynamical system has a set of return times that coincides with a set of return times to some open set in a Kronecker system with translationarily asymmetric closure, then that Kronecker system must be a factor. We also study similar problems involving nilsystems and polynomial return times. We state a number of questions on whether these results extend to other homogeneous spaces and transitive group actions, some of which are already interesting for finite groups.

On topological rank of factors of Cantor minimal systems

A Cantor minimal system is of finite topological rank if it has a Bratteli–Vershik representation whose number of vertices per level is uniformly bounded. We prove that if the topological rank of a minimal dynamical system on a Cantor set is finite, then all its minimal Cantor factors have finite topological rank as well. This gives an affirmative answer to a question posed by Donoso, Durand, Maass, and Petite in full generality. As a consequence, we obtain the dichotomy of Downarowicz and Maass for Cantor factors of finite-rank Cantor minimal systems: they are either odometers or subshifts.

Fixed Point Theorems for Maps With Local and Pointwise Contraction Properties

This paper constitutes a comprehensive study of ten classes of self-maps on metric spaces ⟨X, d⟩ with the pointwise (i.e., local radial) and local contraction properties. Each of these classes appeared previously in the literature in the context of fixed point theorems.We begin with an overview of these fixed point results, including concise self contained sketches of their proofs. Then we proceed with a discussion of the relations among the ten classes of self-maps with domains ⟨X, d⟩ having various topological properties that often appear in the theory of fixed point theorems: completeness, compactness, (path) connectedness, rectifiable-path connectedness, and d-convexity. The bulk of the results presented in this part consists of examples of maps that show non-reversibility of the previously established inclusions between these classes. Among these examples, the most striking is a differentiable auto-homeomorphism f of a compact perfect subset X of ℝ with f′ ≡ 0, which constitutes also a minimal dynamical system. We finish by discussing a few remaining open problems on whether the maps with specific pointwise contraction properties must have the fixed points.

The structure of tame minimal dynamical systems

A dynamical version of the Bourgain–Fremlin–Talagrand dichotomy shows that the enveloping semigroup of a dynamical system is either very large and contains a topological copy of $\beta \mathbb {N}$, or it is a ‘tame’ topological space whose topology is determined by the convergence of sequences. In the latter case, the dynamical system is said to be tame. We use the structure theory of minimal dynamical systems to show that, when the acting group is Abelian, a tame metric minimal dynamical system (i) is almost automorphic (i.e. it is an almost one-to-one extension of an equicontinuous system), and (ii) admits a unique invariant probability measure such that the corresponding measure-preserving system is measure-theoretically isomorphic to the Haar measure system on the maximal equicontinuous factor.