10 – 14 May 2021 (Online)

School of Mathematics, University of Bristol

Amie Wilkinson is distinguished for her groundbreaking research in ergodic theory and smooth dynamical systems and her work has attracted numerous awards and prizes. For example, she was an invited speaker at the ICM in 2010 and she won the AMS Satter Prize in Mathematics in 2011 for her work on stable ergodicity of partially hyperbolic systems. Much more recently, she was awarded the AMS Levi L. Conant Prize in 2020 for an article on Lyapunov exponents, which was published in the Bulletin of the AMS (see here for more details).

Amie Wilkinson, University of Chicago, USA

Lecture 1 (Colloquium Style)

Symmetry and Asymmetry in Dynamics

In classical mechanics, symmetry occurs for a reason: there is a conserved quantity such as angular momentum. This is Noether’s theorem, and it points to a broader theme in dynamics that symmetry is rare and meaningful. I will discuss, in the contexts of modern dynamics and geometry, how this theme recurs in beautiful ways: on the one hand, a typical object has the minimum amount of symmetry possible, and on the other hand, a little extra symmetry implies a lot of symmetry, a phenomenon known as rigidity.

Lecture 2

Asymmetrical Diffeomorphisms

Lecture 3

Geometry, Symmetry and Rigidity