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Several years ago, I developed a public lecture on the cosmic distance ladder in astronomy from a historical perspective (and emphasising the role of mathematics in building the ladder). I previously blogged about the lecture here; the most recent version of the slides can be found here. Recently, I have begun working with Tanya Klowden (a long time friend with a background in popular writing on a variety of topics, including astronomy) to expand the lecture into a popular science book, with the tentative format being non-technical chapters interspersed with some more mathematical sections to give some technical details. We are still in the middle of the writing process, but we have produced a sample chapter (which deals with what we call the “fourth rung” of the distance ladder – the distances and orbits of the planets – and how the work of Copernicus, Brahe, Kepler and others led to accurate measurements of these orbits, as well as Kepler’s famous laws of planetary motion). As always, any feedback on the chapter is welcome. (Due to various pandemic-related uncertainties, we do not have a definite target deadline for when the book will be completed, but presumably this will occur sometime in the next year.)
The book is currently under contract with Yale University Press. My coauthor Tanya Klowden can be reached at tklowden@gmail.com.
Rachel Greenfeld and I have just uploaded to the arXiv our paper “The structure of translational tilings in “. This paper studies the tilings
of a finite tile
in a standard lattice
, that is to say sets
(which we call tiling sets) such that every element of
lies in exactly one of the translates
of
. We also consider more general tilings of level
for a natural number
(several of our results consider an even more general setting in which
is periodic but allowed to be non-constant).
In many cases the tiling set will be periodic (by which we mean translation invariant with respect to some lattice (a finite index subgroup) of
). For instance one simple example of a tiling is when
is the unit square
and
is the lattice
. However one can modify some tilings to make them less periodic. For instance, keeping
one also has the tiling set
The most well known conjecture in this area is the Periodic Tiling Conjecture:
Conjecture 1 (Periodic tiling conjecture) If a finite tilehas at least one tiling set, then it has a tiling set which is periodic.
This conjecture was stated explicitly by Lagarias and Wang, and also appears implicitly in this text of Grunbaum and Shepard. In one dimension there is a simple pigeonhole principle argument of Newman that shows that all tiling sets are in fact periodic, which certainly implies the periodic tiling conjecture in this case. The
case was settled more recently by Bhattacharya, but the higher dimensional cases
remain open in general.
We are able to obtain a new proof of Bhattacharya’s result that also gives some quantitative bounds on the periodic tiling set, which are polynomial in the diameter of the set if the cardinality of the tile is bounded:
Theorem 2 (Quantitative periodic tiling in) If a finite tile
has at least one tiling set, then it has a tiling set which is
-periodic for some
.
Among other things, this shows that the problem of deciding whether a given subset of of bounded cardinality tiles
or not is in the NP complexity class with respect to the diameter
. (Even the decidability of this problem was not known until the result of Bhattacharya.)
We also have a closely related structural theorem:
Theorem 3 (Quantitative weakly periodic tiling in) Every tiling set of a finite tile
is weakly periodic. In fact, the tiling set is the union of at most
disjoint sets, each of which is periodic in a direction of magnitude
.
We also have a new bound for the periodicity of tilings in :
Theorem 4 (Universal period for tilings in) Let
be finite, and normalized so that
. Then every tiling set of
is
-periodic, where
is the least common multiple of all primes up to
, and
is the least common multiple of the magnitudes
of all
.
We remark that the current best complexity bound of determining whether a subset of tiles
or not is
, due to Biro. It may be that the results in this paper can improve upon this bound, at least for tiles of bounded cardinality.
On the other hand, we discovered a genuine difference between level one tiling and higher level tiling, by locating a counterexample to the higher level analogue of (the qualitative version of) Theorem 3:
Theorem 5 (Counterexample) There exists an eight-element subsetand a level
tiling
such that
is not weakly periodic.
We do not know if there is a corresponding counterexample to the higher level periodic tiling conjecture (that if tiles
at level
, then there is a periodic tiling at the same level
). Note that it is important to keep the level fixed, since one trivially always has a periodic tiling at level
from the identity
.
The methods of Bhattacharya used the language of ergodic theory. Our investigations also originally used ergodic-theoretic and Fourier-analytic techniques, but we ultimately found combinatorial methods to be more effective in this problem (and in particular led to quite strong quantitative bounds). The engine powering all of our results is the following remarkable fact, valid in all dimensions:
Lemma 6 (Dilation lemma) Suppose thatis a tiling of a finite tile
. Then
is also a tiling of the dilated tile
for any
coprime to
, where
is the least common multiple of all the primes up to
.
Versions of this dilation lemma have previously appeared in work of Tijdeman and of Bhattacharya. We sketch a proof here. By the fundamental theorem of arithmetic and iteration it suffices to establish the case where is a prime
. We need to show that
. It suffices to show the claim
, since both sides take values in
. The convolution algebra
(or group algebra) of finitely supported functions from
to
is a commutative algebra of characteristic
, so we have the Frobenius identity
for any
. As a consequence we see that
. The claim now follows by convolving the identity
by
further copies of
.
In our paper we actually establish a more general version of the dilation lemma that can handle tilings of higher level or of a periodic set, and this stronger version is useful to get the best quantitative results, but for simplicity we focus attention just on the above simple special case of the dilation lemma.
By averaging over all in an arithmetic progression, one already gets a useful structural theorem for tilings in any dimension, which appears to be new despite being an easy consequence of Lemma 6:
Corollary 7 (Structure theorem for tilings) Suppose thatis a tiling of a finite tile
, where we normalize
. Then we have a decomposition
where each
is a function that is periodic in the direction
, where
is the least common multiple of all the primes up to
.
Proof: From Lemma 6 we have for any
, where
is the Kronecker delta at
. Now average over
(extracting a weak limit or generalised limit as necessary) to obtain the conclusion.
The identity (1) turns out to impose a lot of constraints on the functions , particularly in one and two dimensions. On one hand, one can work modulo
to eliminate the
and
terms to obtain the equation
For level tilings the analogue of (2) becomes
We are currently studying what this machinery can tell us about tilings in higher dimensions, focusing initially on the three-dimensional case.
Asgar Jamneshan and I have just uploaded to the arXiv our paper “Foundational aspects of uncountable measure theory: Gelfand duality, Riesz representation, canonical models, and canonical disintegration“. This paper arose from our longer-term project to systematically develop “uncountable” ergodic theory – ergodic theory in which the groups acting are not required to be countable, the probability spaces one acts on are not required to be standard Borel, or Polish, and the compact groups that arise in the structural theory (e.g., the theory of group extensions) are not required to be separable. One of the motivations of doing this is to allow ergodic theory results to be applied to ultraproducts of finite dynamical systems, which can then hopefully be transferred to establish combinatorial results with good uniformity properties. An instance of this is the uncountable Mackey-Zimmer theorem, discussed in this companion blog post.
In the course of this project, we ran into the obstacle that many foundational results, such as the Riesz representation theorem, often require one or more of these countability hypotheses when encountered in textbooks. Other technical issues also arise in the uncountable setting, such as the need to distinguish the Borel -algebra from the (two different types of) Baire
-algebra. As such we needed to spend some time reviewing and synthesizing the known literature on some foundational results of “uncountable” measure theory, which led to this paper. As such, most of the results of this paper are already in the literature, either explicitly or implicitly, in one form or another (with perhaps the exception of the canonical disintegration, which we discuss below); we view the main contribution of this paper as presenting the results in a coherent and unified fashion. In particular we found that the language of category theory was invaluable in clarifying and organizing all the different results. In subsequent work we (and some other authors) will use the results in this paper for various applications in uncountable ergodic theory.
The foundational results covered in this paper can be divided into a number of subtopics (Gelfand duality, Baire -algebras and Riesz representation, canonical models, and canonical disintegration), which we discuss further below the fold.
Asgar Jamneshan and I have just uploaded to the arXiv our paper “An uncountable Mackey-Zimmer theorem“. This paper is part of our longer term project to develop “uncountable” versions of various theorems in ergodic theory; see this previous paper of Asgar and myself for the first paper in this series (and another paper will appear shortly).
In this case the theorem in question is the Mackey-Zimmer theorem, previously discussed in this blog post. This theorem gives an important classification of group and homogeneous extensions of measure-preserving systems. Let us first work in the (classical) setting of concrete measure-preserving systems. Let be a measure-preserving system for some group
, thus
is a (concrete) probability space and
is a group homomorphism from
to the automorphism group
of the probability space. (Here we are abusing notation by using
to refer both to the measure-preserving system and to the underlying set. In the notation of the paper we would instead distinguish these two objects as
and
respectively, reflecting two of the (many) categories one might wish to view
as a member of, but for sake of this informal overview we will not maintain such precise distinctions.) If
is a compact group, we define a (concrete) cocycle to be a collection of measurable functions
for
that obey the cocycle equation
-
is the Cartesian product of
and
;
-
is the product measure of
and Haar probability measure on
; and
- The action
is given by the formula
This group skew-product comes with a factor map
and a coordinate map
, which by (2) are related to the action via the identities
We can now generalize the notion of group skew-product by just working with the maps , and weakening the requirement that
be measure-preserving. Namely, define a group extension of
by
to be a measure-preserving system
equipped with a measure-preserving map
obeying (3) and a measurable map
obeying (4) for some cocycle
, such that the
-algebra of
is generated by
. There is also a more general notion of a homogeneous extension in which
takes values in
rather than
. Then every group skew-product
is a group extension of
by
, but not conversely. Here are some key counterexamples:
- (i) If
is a closed subgroup of
, and
is a cocycle taking values in
, then
can be viewed as a group extension of
by
, taking
to be the vertical coordinate
(viewing
now as an element of
). This will not be a skew-product by
because
pushes forward to the wrong measure on
: it pushes forward to
rather than
.
- (ii) If one takes the same example as (i), but twists the vertical coordinate
to another vertical coordinate
for some measurable “gauge function”
, then
is still a group extension by
, but now with the cocycle
replaced by the cohomologous cocycle
Again, this will not be a skew product by, because
pushes forward to a twisted version of
that is supported (at least in the case where
is compact and the cocycle
is continuous) on the
-bundle
.
- (iii) With the situation as in (i), take
to be the union
for some
outside of
, where we continue to use the action (2) and the standard vertical coordinate
but now use the measure
.
As it turns out, group extensions and homogeneous extensions arise naturally in the Furstenberg-Zimmer structural theory of measure-preserving systems; roughly speaking, every compact extension of is an inverse limit of group extensions. It is then of interest to classify such extensions.
Examples such as (iii) are annoying, but they can be excluded by imposing the additional condition that the system is ergodic – all invariant (or essentially invariant) sets are of measure zero or measure one. (An essentially invariant set is a measurable subset
of
such that
is equal modulo null sets to
for all
.) For instance, the system in (iii) is non-ergodic because the set
(or
) is invariant but has measure
. We then have the following fundamental result of Mackey and Zimmer:
Theorem 1 (Countable Mackey Zimmer theorem) Letbe a group,
be a concrete measure-preserving system, and
be a compact Hausdorff group. Assume that
is at most countable,
is a standard Borel space, and
is metrizable. Then every (concrete) ergodic group extension of
is abstractly isomorphic to a group skew-product (by some closed subgroup
of
), and every (concrete) ergodic homogeneous extension of
is similarly abstractly isomorphic to a homogeneous skew-product.
We will not define precisely what “abstractly isomorphic” means here, but it roughly speaking means “isomorphic after quotienting out the null sets”. A proof of this theorem can be found for instance in .
The main result of this paper is to remove the “countability” hypotheses from the above theorem, at the cost of working with opposite probability algebra systems rather than concrete systems. (We will discuss opposite probability algebras in a subsequent blog post relating to another paper in this series.)
Theorem 2 (Uncountable Mackey Zimmer theorem) Letbe a group,
be an opposite probability algebra measure-preserving system, and
be a compact Hausdorff group. Then every (abstract) ergodic group extension of
is abstractly isomorphic to a group skew-product (by some closed subgroup
of
), and every (abstract) ergodic homogeneous extension of
is similarly abstractly isomorphic to a homogeneous skew-product.
We plan to use this result in future work to obtain uncountable versions of the Furstenberg-Zimmer and Host-Kra structure theorems.
As one might expect, one locates a proof of Theorem 2 by finding a proof of Theorem 1 that does not rely too strongly on “countable” tools, such as disintegration or measurable selection, so that all of those tools can be replaced by “uncountable” counterparts. The proof we use is based on the one given in this previous post, and begins by comparing the system with the group extension
. As the examples (i), (ii) show, these two systems need not be isomorphic even in the ergodic case, due to the different probability measures employed. However one can relate the two after performing an additional averaging in
. More precisely, there is a canonical factor map
given by the formula
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