KTH/SU Mathematics Colloquium

October 24, 2008 (Note the date, time and place: 11:00-12:00 room E3)

Hillel Furstenberg, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Ergodic Fractal Measures

We shall describe a generalized phenomenon of "self similarity" which shows up in a a broad family of fractals. An example is the typical brownian motion path in dimension d>2 for which the "scenery" when "zooming down" to almost any point of the path is identical, in an appropriate statistical sense. It will be convenient to deal with measures supported on fractals rather than with the fractals themselves, and in this context we can avail ourselves of machinery from ergodic theory. In particular we point to a class of natural measure valued Markov processes for which the typical measure appearing displays the type of self-similarity referred to here.