Recommended Background

Only basic knowledge will be assumed in ergodic theory, as it can be found for instance in the beginning of Walter's book, including the concepts of invariant measures, ergodicity, the mean and pointwise ergodic theorems, Poincaré recurrence theorem, and the definitions of entropy. Some chapters of a forthcoming book by Einsiedler and Ward are already available and form a valuable introduction.

Basics of Fourier analysis on compact abelian groups, modest commutative algebra and number theory, including p-adic numbers, uniform distribution, introductory diophantine approximation will be also expected.

The course of M. Einsiedler will assume only minimal knowledge about Lie groups, for instance Chapter 0 of Knapp's book.


Recommended Reading