Went to a conference at PSU with three other math phd students…it last 4 days but we missed the first day. Daniel drove us there, so thanks him a lot! since it’s more than a 5-hour drive.
The conference(or workshop?) is also meant to be the celebration of Katok’s 70th birthday. So he is surly present at every talk. I sat right behind him the the second day but unfortunately, he talked a lot such that sometimes made me not able to concentrate on the talk.
I learned quite a lot from the first day’s talk. Lindenstrauss talked about mean dimension which is designed to be an extension of entropy– when entropy goes to infinity, we hope mean dimension could help us distinguish different dynamical systems.
At the last day, Sarnak, which is definitely some sort of authority in the field of number theory, gave a talk on Mobius function. According to him, understanding the randomness of this function is of huge importance. He talked about disjointness, which made me motivated to learn about Furstenberg’s proof of Szemeredi’s theorem.