Title: Renormalization, fractal geometry and the Newhouse phenomenon
Speaker: Artur Avila (IMPA)
Date, Time, Location: Wednesday, April 23rd @4:30PM – 5:30PM in Math Hall 520
Abstract:
As discovered by Poincaré in the end of the 19th century, even small perturbations of very regular dynamical systems may display chaotic features, due to complicated interactions near a homoclinic point. In the 1960’s Smale attempted to understand such dynamics in term of a stable model, the horseshoe, but this was too optimistic. Indeed, Newhouse showed that even in only two dimensions, a homoclinic bifurcation gives rise to particular wild dynamics, such as the generic presence of infinitely many attractors. This Newhouse phenomenon is associated to a renormalization mechanism, but also with particular geometric properties of some fractal sets within a Smale horseshoe. When considering two-dimensional complex dynamics those fractal sets become much more beautiful but unfortunately also more difficult to handle.
