Jointly ergodic measure-preserving transformations

The notion of ergodicity of a measure-preserving transformation is generalized to finite sets of transformations. The main result is that ifT ₁,T ₂, …,T _s are invertible commuting measure-preserving transformations of a probability space (X, ?, μ) then 1 $$\frac{1}{{N - M}}\sum\limits_{n = M}^{N - 1} {T{}_1^n } f_1 .T_2^n f_2 .....T_s^n f_s \xrightarrow{N - M \to \propto }]{{I^2 (X)}}(\int_X {f1d\mu )} (\int_X {f2d\mu )...(\int_X {fsd\mu )} } $$ for anyf ₁,f ₂, …,f _s∈L ^x (X, ?, μ) iffT ₁×T ₂×…×T _s and all the transformationsT _iT_j ¹,i≠j, are ergodic. The multiple recurrence theorem for a weakly mixing transformation follows as a special case.