English

Measure Preserving Diffeomorphisms of the Torus are Unclassifiable

Dynamical Systems 2020-11-10 v2

Abstract

The isomorphism problem in ergodic theory was formulated by von Neumann in 1932 in his pioneering paper Zur Operatorenmethode in der klassischen Mechanik (Ann. of Math. (2), 33(3):587--642, 1932). The problem has been solved for some classes of transformations that have special properties, such as the collection of transformations with discrete spectrum or Bernoulli shifts. This paper shows that a general classification is impossible (even in concrete settings) by showing that the collection EE of pairs of ergodic, Lebesgue measure preserving diffeomorphisms (S,T)(S,T) of the 2-torus that are isomorphic is a complete analytic set in the CC^\infty- topology (and hence not Borel).

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1705.04414,
  title  = {Measure Preserving Diffeomorphisms of the Torus are Unclassifiable},
  author = {Matthew Foreman and Benjamin Weiss},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1705.04414},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

80 pages, 4 figures