Date:	Mon, December 9, 2013
Time:	17:15
Place:	Research II Lecture Hall

Abstract: Geodesic flows of Riemannian or Finsler manifolds provided the original examples in the quest for the Maxwell-Boltzmann ergodic hypothesis, and they have been the only known contact Anosov flows. We show that even in dimension 3 the world of contact Anosov flow is vastly larger via a surgery construction that produces flows not topologically equivalent to any algebraic flow. This includes examples on many hyperbolic 3-manifolds, any of which have remarkable dynamical and geometric properties.