On homeomorphic Bernoulli measures on the Cantor space

Let be the Bernoulli measure on the Cantor space given as the infinite product of two-point measures with weights and . It is a long-standing open problem to characterize those and such that and are topologically equivalent (i.e., there is a homeomorphism from the Cantor space to itself sending to ). The (possibly) weaker property of and being continuously reducible to each other is equivalent to a property of and called binomial equivalence. In this paper we define an algebraic property called ``refinability' and show that, if and are refinable and binomially equivalent, then and are topologically equivalent. Next we show that refinability is equivalent to a fairly simple algebraic property. Finally, we give a class of examples of binomially equivalent and refinable numbers; in particular, the positive numbers and such that and are refinable, so the corresponding measures are topologically equivalent.

     

Geometry and ergodic theory of non-hyperbolic exponential maps

We deal with all the maps from the exponential family such that the orbit of zero escapes to infinity sufficiently fast. In particular all the parameters are included. We introduce as our main technical devices the projection of the map to the infinite cylinder and an appropriate conformal measure . We prove that , essentially the set of points in returning infinitely often to a compact region of disjoint from the orbit of , has the Hausdorff dimension , that the -dimensional Hausdorff measure of is positive and finite, and that the -dimensional packing measure is locally infinite at each point of . We also prove the existence and uniqueness of a Borel probability -invariant ergodic measure equivalent to the conformal measure . As a byproduct of the main course of our considerations, we reprove the result obtained independently by Lyubich and Rees that the -limit set (under ) of Lebesgue almost every point in , coincides with the orbit of zero under the map . Finally we show that the the function , , is continuous.

     

Cancellation and stable rank for direct limits of recursive subhomogeneous algebras

We prove the following results for a unital simple direct limit of recursive subhomogeneous algebras with no dimension growth:

(1)

(2) The projections in satisfy cancellation: if then

(3) satisfies Blackadar's Second Fundamental Comparability Question: if are projections such that for all normalized traces on then

(4) is unperforated for the strict order: if and there is such that then

The last three of these results hold under certain weaker dimension growth conditions and without assuming simplicity. We use these results to obtain previously unknown information on the ordered K-theory of the crossed product obtained from a minimal homeomorphism of a finite-dimensional infinite compact metric space Specifically, is unperforated for the strict order, and satisfies the following K-theoretic version of Blackadar's Second Fundamental Comparability Question: if satisfies for all normalized traces on then there is a projection such that

     

Curves of genus 2 with group of automorphisms isomorphic to or

The classification of curves of genus 2 over an algebraically closed field was studied by Clebsch and Bolza using invariants of binary sextic forms, and completed by Igusa with the computation of the corresponding three-dimensional moduli variety . The locus of curves with group of automorphisms isomorphic to one of the dihedral groups or is a one-dimensional subvariety.

In this paper we classify these curves over an arbitrary perfect field of characteristic in the case and in the case. We first parameterize the -isomorphism classes of curves defined over by the -rational points of a quasi-affine one-dimensional subvariety of ; then, for every curve representing a point in that variety we compute all of its -twists, which is equivalent to the computation of the cohomology set .

The classification is always performed by explicitly describing the objects involved: the curves are given by hyperelliptic models and their groups of automorphisms represented as subgroups of . In particular, we give two generic hyperelliptic equations, depending on several parameters of , that by specialization produce all curves in every -isomorphism class.

     

Torsion freeness of symmetric powers of ideals

Let be an ideal in a Noetherian commutative ring with unit, let be an integer, and let be the canonical surjective -module homomorphism from the th symmetric power of to the th power of . When or when is a perfect Gorenstein ideal of grade , we provide a necessary and sufficient condition for to be an isomorphism in terms of upper bounds for the minimal number of generators of the localisations of . When is a maximal ideal of we show that is an isomorphism if and only if is a regular local ring. In all three cases for our results yield that if is an isomorphism, then is also an isomorphism for each .

     

An analogue of the Descartes-Euler formula for infinite graphs and Higuchi's conjecture

Let be a connected 2-manifold without boundary obtained from a (possibly infinite) collection of polygons by identifying them along edges of equal length. Let be the set of vertices, and for every , let denote the (Gaussian) curvature of : minus the sum of incident polygon angles. Descartes showed that whenever may be realized as the surface of a convex polytope in . More generally, if is made of finitely many polygons, Euler's formula is equivalent to the equation where is the Euler characteristic of . Our main theorem shows that whenever converges and there is a positive lower bound on the distance between any pair of vertices in , there exists a compact closed 2-manifold and an integer so that is homeomorphic to minus points, and further .

In the special case when every polygon is regular of side length one and for every vertex , we apply our main theorem to deduce that is made of finitely many polygons and is homeomorphic to either the 2-sphere or to the projective plane. Further, we show that unless is a prism, antiprism, or the projective planar analogue of one of these that . This resolves a recent conjecture of Higuchi.

     

Boundary blow-up in nonlinear elliptic equations of Bieberbach-Rademacher type

We establish the uniqueness of the positive solution for equations of the form in , . The special feature is to consider nonlinearities whose variation at infinity is not regular (e.g., , , , , , , or ) and functions in vanishing on . The main innovation consists of using Karamata's theory not only in the statement/proof of the main result but also to link the nonregular variation of at infinity with the blow-up rate of the solution near .

     

Images of the Brownian sheet

An -parameter Brownian sheet in maps a non-random compact set in to the random compact set in . We prove two results on the image-set :

(1) It has positive -dimensional Lebesgue measure if and only if has positive -dimensional capacity. This generalizes greatly the earlier works of J. Hawkes  (1977), J.-P. Kahane  (1985), and Khoshnevisan (1999).

(2) If , then with probability one, we can find a finite number of points such that for any rotation matrix that leaves in , one of the 's is interior to . In particular, has interior-points a.s. This verifies a conjecture of T. S. Mountford  (1989).

This paper contains two novel ideas: To prove (1), we introduce and analyze a family of bridged sheets. Item (2) is proved by developing a notion of ``sectorial local-non-determinism (LND).' Both ideas may be of independent interest.

We showcase sectorial LND further by exhibiting some arithmetic properties of standard Brownian motion; this completes the work initiated by Mountford (1988).

     

Singular solutions of parabolic -Laplacian with absorption

We consider, for and , the -Laplacian evolution equation with absorption

We are interested in those solutions, which we call singular solutions, that are non-negative, non-trivial, continuous in , and satisfy for all . We prove the following:

(i)

When , there does not exist any such singular solution.

(ii)

When , there exists, for every , a unique singular solution that satisfies as .

Also, as , where is a singular solution that satisfies as .

Furthermore, any singular solution is either or for some finite positive .

     

Analyticity on translates of a Jordan curve

Let be a domain in which is symmetric with respect to the real axis and whose boundary is a real analytic simple closed curve. Translate vertically to get where is such that . We prove that if is a continuous function on such that for each , the function has a continuous extension to which is holomorphic on , then is holomorphic on .

     

On embeddings of proper and equicontinuous actions in zero-dimensional compactifications

We provide a tool for studying properly discontinuous actions of non-compact groups on locally compact, connected and paracompact spaces, by embedding such an action in a suitable zero-dimensional compactification of the underlying space with pleasant properties. Precisely, given such an action we construct a zero-dimensional compactification of with the properties: (a) there exists an extension of the action on , (b) if is the set of the limit points of the orbits of the initial action in , then the restricted action remains properly discontinuous, is indivisible and equicontinuous with respect to the uniformity induced on by that of , and (c) is the maximal among the zero-dimensional compactifications of with these properties. Proper actions are usually embedded in the endpoint compactification of , in order to obtain topological invariants concerning the cardinality of the space of the ends of , provided that has an additional ``nice" property of rather local character (``property Z", i.e., every compact subset of is contained in a compact and connected one). If the considered space has this property, our new compactification coincides with the endpoint one. On the other hand, we give an example of a space not having the ``property Z" for which our compactification is different from the endpoint compactification. As an application, we show that the invariant concerning the cardinality of the ends of holds also for a class of actions strictly containing the properly discontinuous ones and for spaces not necessarily having ``property Z".

     

Surjectivity for Hamiltonian -spaces in -theory

Let be a compact connected Lie group, and a Hamiltonian -space with proper moment map . We give a surjectivity result which expresses the -theory of the symplectic quotient in terms of the equivariant -theory of the original manifold , under certain technical conditions on . This result is a natural -theoretic analogue of the Kirwan surjectivity theorem in symplectic geometry. The main technical tool is the -theoretic Atiyah-Bott lemma, which plays a fundamental role in the symplectic geometry of Hamiltonian -spaces. We discuss this lemma in detail and highlight the differences between the -theory and rational cohomology versions of this lemma.

We also introduce a -theoretic version of equivariant formality and prove that when the fundamental group of is torsion-free, every compact Hamiltonian -space is equivariantly formal. Under these conditions, the forgetful map is surjective, and thus every complex vector bundle admits a stable equivariant structure. Furthermore, by considering complex line bundles, we show that every integral cohomology class in admits an equivariant extension in .

     

The distance function from the boundary in a Minkowski space

Let the space be endowed with a Minkowski structure (that is, is the gauge function of a compact convex set having the origin as an interior point, and with boundary of class ), and let be the (asymmetric) distance associated to . Given an open domain of class , let be the Minkowski distance of a point from the boundary of . We prove that a suitable extension of to (which plays the rôle of a signed Minkowski distance to ) is of class in a tubular neighborhood of , and that is of class outside the cut locus of (that is, the closure of the set of points of nondifferentiability of in ). In addition, we prove that the cut locus of has Lebesgue measure zero, and that can be decomposed, up to this set of vanishing measure, into geodesics starting from and going into along the normal direction (with respect to the Minkowski distance). We compute explicitly the Jacobian determinant of the change of variables that associates to every point outside the cut locus the pair , where denotes the (unique) projection of on , and we apply these techniques to the analysis of PDEs of Monge-Kantorovich type arising from problems in optimal transportation theory and shape optimization.

     

Quadratic maps and Bockstein closed group extensions

Let be a central extension of the form where and are elementary abelian -groups. Associated to there is a quadratic map , given by the -power map, which uniquely determines the extension. This quadratic map also determines the extension class of the extension in and an ideal in which is generated by the components of . We say that is Bockstein closed if is an ideal closed under the Bockstein operator.

We find a direct condition on the quadratic map that characterizes when the extension is Bockstein closed. Using this characterization, we show for example that quadratic maps induced from the fundamental quadratic map given by yield Bockstein closed extensions.

On the other hand, it is well known that an extension is Bockstein closed if and only if it lifts to an extension for some -lattice . In this situation, one may write for a ``binding matrix' with entries in . We find a direct way to calculate the module structure of in terms of . Using this, we study extensions where the lattice is diagonalizable/triangulable and find interesting equivalent conditions to these properties.

     

On -adic intermediate Jacobians

For an algebraic variety of dimension with totally degenerate reduction over a -adic field (definition recalled below) and an integer with , we define a rigid analytic torus together with an Abel-Jacobi mapping to it from the Chow group of codimension algebraic cycles that are homologically equivalent to zero modulo rational equivalence. These tori are analogous to those defined by Griffiths using Hodge theory over . We compare and contrast the complex and -adic theories. Finally, we examine a special case of a -adic analogue of the Generalized Hodge Conjecture.

     

Semi-edges, reflections and Coxeter groups

We combine the theory of Coxeter groups, the covering theory of graphs introduced by Malnic, Nedela and Skoviera and the theory of reflections of graphs in order to obtain the following characterization of a Coxeter group:

Let be a -covering of a monopole admitting semi-edges only. The graph is the Cayley graph of a Coxeter group if and only if is regular and any deck transformation in that interchanges two neighboring vertices of acts as a reflection on .

     

Strongly self-absorbing -algebras

Say that a separable, unital -algebra is strongly self-absorbing if there exists an isomorphism such that and are approximately unitarily equivalent -homomorphisms. We study this class of algebras, which includes the Cuntz algebras , , the UHF algebras of infinite type, the Jiang-Su algebra and tensor products of with UHF algebras of infinite type. Given a strongly self-absorbing -algebra we characterise when a separable -algebra absorbs tensorially (i.e., is -stable), and prove closure properties for the class of separable -stable -algebras. Finally, we compute the possible -groups and prove a number of classification results which suggest that the examples listed above are the only strongly self-absorbing -algebras.

     

Hölder regularity of the normal distance with an application to a PDE model for growing sandpiles

Given a bounded domain in with smooth boundary, the cut locus is the closure of the set of nondifferentiability points of the distance from the boundary of . The normal distance to the cut locus, , is the map which measures the length of the line segment joining to the cut locus along the normal direction , whenever . Recent results show that this map, restricted to boundary points, is Lipschitz continuous, as long as the boundary of is of class . Our main result is the global Hölder regularity of in the case of a domain with analytic boundary. We will also show that the regularity obtained is optimal, as soon as the set of the so-called regular conjugate points is nonempty. In all the other cases, Lipschitz continuity can be extended to the whole domain . The above regularity result for is also applied to derive the Hölder continuity of the solution of a system of partial differential equations that arises in granular matter theory and optimal mass transfer.

     

Torsion on elliptic curves in isogeny classes

Let be an elliptic curve over a number field and its -isogeny class. We are interested in determining the orders and the types of torsion groups in . For a prime , we give the range of possible types of -primary parts of when runs over . One of our results immediately gives a simple proof of a theorem of Katz on the order of maximal -primary torsion in .