AnInvitationtoRigidityTheory-UniversityofMichigan.PDF

AN INVITATION TO RIGIDITY THEORY R. J. SPATZIER Dedicated to Anatole Katok on the occasion of his 60th birthday. INTRODUCTION This survey is dedicated to Professor Anatole Katok on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday. He has made numerous important contributions to dynamics and ergodic theory proper. During the last two decades, he was one of the key researchers in the field of rigidity or geometric rigidity. My goal here is to give a bird’s eye view of this subject with particular attention to the many ideas and topics Professor Katok has been directly involved with. Rigidity theory is now in its fifth decade. It started with conjectures of A. Selberg and the early local rigidity theorems of A. Weil as well as E. Calabi and E. Vesentini in the early sixties. Mostow’s celebrated Strong Rigidity Theorem in 1968 was a spectacular breakthrough and inspired whole new areas of research for rigidity phenomena in geometry, group theory and dynamics. After a brief review of this early history, we will discuss these new areas and topics. Rigidity theory by now is a large field with many branches and connections, and it is impossible to even just mention all important developments in one short survey. We refer to [91, 145, 146, 160, 190] for more intensive introductions to this field, and will refer to other more specialized surveys as we go along. EARLY RIGIDITY THEORY In 1960, A. Selberg made the beautiful discovery that up to conjugation the fundamental groups of certain compact locally symmetric spaces are always defined over the algebraic numbers. Thus it is implausible that such groups can be deformed. More precisely, we say that a subgroup Γ of another group G is deformation rigid in G if for any continuous