Texas A&M University, Department of Mathematics, 216 Milner Hall, 3rd of October 2007, 3:00-3:50

Groups and Dynamics Seminar


Weak mixing and l_1

David Kerr of Texas A&M University

Rosenthal's l_1 theorem gives a local characterization of Banach spaces containing l_1 in terms of a dichotomy between randomness and compactness. For unitary representations of groups there is an analogous dichotomy involving weak mixing and finite-dimensional subrepresentations. I will show that, despite the topological nature of Rosenthal's l_1 theorem, in the context of measurable dynamics these two dichotomies provide different means for describing the same phenomenon. This is joint work with Hanfeng Li.