We outline a personal, professional, and scientific biography of Anatole Katok.

Given a closed, orientable, compact surface S of constant negative curvature and genus $g \geq 2$, we study the measure-theoretic entropy of the Bowen–Series boundary map with respect to its smooth invariant measure. We obtain an explicit formula for the entropy that only depends on the perimeter of the $(8g-4)$-sided fundamental polygon of the surface S and its genus. Using this, we analyze how the entropy changes in the Teichmüller space of S and prove the following flexibility result: the measure-theoretic entropy takes all values between 0 and a maximum that is achieved on the surface that admits a regular $(8g-4)$-sided fundamental polygon. We also compare the measure-theoretic entropy to the topological entropy of these maps and show that the smooth invariant measure is not a measure of maximal entropy.

We use Lerman’s contact cut construction to find a sufficient condition for Hamiltonian diffeomorphisms of compact surfaces to embed into a closed $3$-manifold as Poincaré return maps on a global surface of section for a Reeb flow. In particular, we show that the irrational pseudorotations of the $2$-disc constructed by Fayad and Katok embed into the Reeb flow of a dynamically convex contact form on the $3$-sphere.

We explore new connections between the dynamics of conservative partially hyperbolic systems and the geometric measure-theoretic properties of their invariant foliations. Our methods are applied to two main classes of volume-preserving diffeomorphisms: fibered partially hyperbolic diffeomorphisms and center-fixing partially hyperbolic systems. When the center is one-dimensional, assuming the diffeomorphism is accessible, we prove that the disintegration of the volume measure along the center foliation is either atomic or Lebesgue. Moreover, the latter case is rigid in dimension three (this does not require accessibility): the center foliation is actually smooth and the diffeomorphism is smoothly conjugate to an explicit rigid model. A partial extension to fibered partially hyperbolic systems with compact fibers of any dimension is also obtained. A common feature of these classes of diffeomorphisms is that the center leaves either are compact or can be made compact by taking an appropriate dynamically defined quotient. For volume-preserving partially hyperbolic diffeomorphisms whose center foliation is absolutely continuous, if the generic center leaf is a circle, then every center leaf is compact.

We construct a $C^1$ symplectic twist map g of the annulus that has an essential invariant curve $\Gamma $ such that $\Gamma $ is not differentiable and g restricted to $\Gamma $ is minimal.

We show that the ergodic integrals for the horocycle flow on the two-torus associated by Giulietti and Liverani with an Anosov diffeomorphism either grow linearly or are bounded; in other words, there are no deviations. For this, we use the topological invariance of the Artin–Mazur zeta function to exclude resonances outside the open unit disc. Transfer operators acting on suitable spaces of anisotropic distributions and their Ruelle determinants are the key tools used in the proof. As a bonus, we show that for any $C^\infty $ Anosov diffeomorphism F on the two-torus, the correlations for the measure of maximal entropy and $C^\infty $ observables decay with a rate strictly smaller than $e^{-h_{\mathrm {top}}(F)}$. We compare our results with very recent related work of Forni.

Let M be a geometrically finite acylindrical hyperbolic $3$-manifold and let $M^*$ denote the interior of the convex core of M. We show that any geodesic plane in $M^*$ is either closed or dense, and that there are only countably many closed geodesic planes in $M^*$. These results were obtained by McMullen, Mohammadi and Oh [Geodesic planes in hyperbolic 3-manifolds. Invent. Math. 209 (2017), 425–461; Geodesic planes in the convex core of an acylindrical 3-manifold. Duke Math. J., to appear, Preprint, 2018, arXiv:1802.03853] when M is convex cocompact. As a corollary, we obtain that when M covers an arithmetic hyperbolic $3$-manifold $M_0$, the topological behavior of a geodesic plane in $M^*$ is governed by that of the corresponding plane in $M_0$. We construct a counterexample of this phenomenon when $M_0$ is non-arithmetic.

We outline the flexibility program in smooth dynamics, focusing on flexibility of Lyapunov exponents for volume-preserving diffeomorphisms. We prove flexibility results for Anosov diffeomorphisms admitting dominated splittings into one-dimensional bundles.

We construct an example of a Hamiltonian flow $f^t$ on a four-dimensional smooth manifold $\mathcal {M}$ which after being restricted to an energy surface $\mathcal {M}_e$ demonstrates essential coexistence of regular and chaotic dynamics, that is, there is an open and dense $f^t$-invariant subset $U\subset \mathcal {M}_e$ such that the restriction $f^t|U$ has non-zero Lyapunov exponents in all directions (except for the direction of the flow) and is a Bernoulli flow while, on the boundary $\partial U$, which has positive volume, all Lyapunov exponents of the system are zero.

This paper develops new techniques for studying smooth dynamical systems in the presence of a Carnot–Carathéodory metric. Principally, we employ the theory of Margulis and Mostow, Métivier, Mitchell, and Pansu on tangent cones to establish resonances between Lyapunov exponents. We apply these results in three different settings. First, we explore rigidity properties of smooth dominated splittings for Anosov diffeomorphisms and flows via associated smooth Carnot–Carathéodory metrics. Second, we obtain local rigidity properties of higher hyperbolic rank metrics in a neighborhood of a locally symmetric one. For the latter application we also prove structural stability of the Brin–Pesin asymptotic holonomy group for frame flows. Finally, we obtain local rigidity properties for uniform lattice actions on the ideal boundary of quaternionic and octonionic symmetric spaces.

We introduce two properties: strong R-property and $C(q)$-property, describing a special way of divergence of nearby trajectories for an abstract measure-preserving system. We show that systems satisfying the strong R-property are disjoint (in the sense of Furstenberg) with systems satisfying the $C(q)$-property. Moreover, we show that if $u_t$ is a unipotent flow on $G/\Gamma $ with $\Gamma $ irreducible, then $u_t$ satisfies the $C(q)$-property provided that $u_t$ is not of the form $h_t\times \operatorname {id}$, where $h_t$ is the classical horocycle flow. Finally, we show that the strong R-property holds for all (smooth) time changes of horocycle flows and non-trivial time changes of bounded-type Heisenberg nilflows.

Assuming positive entropy, we prove a measure rigidity theorem for higher rank actions on tori and solenoids by commuting automorphisms. We also apply this result to obtain a complete classification of disjointness and measurable factors for these actions.

We consider a smooth area-preserving Anosov diffeomorphism $f\colon \mathbb T^2\rightarrow \mathbb T^2$ homotopic to an Anosov automorphism L of $\mathbb T^2$. It is known that the positive Lyapunov exponent of f with respect to the normalized Lebesgue measure is less than or equal to the topological entropy of L, which, in addition, is less than or equal to the Lyapunov exponent of f with respect to the probability measure of maximal entropy. Moreover, the equalities only occur simultaneously. We show that these are the only restrictions on these two dynamical invariants.

We present examples of nearly integrable analytic Hamiltonian systems with several strong diffusion properties: topological weak mixing and diffusion at all times. These examples are obtained by AbC constructions with several frequencies.

We use feral pseudoholomorphic curves and adiabatic degeneration to prove an extended version of the so-called ‘almost existence result’ for regular compact Hamiltonian energy surfaces. That is, that for a variety of symplectic manifolds equipped with a Hamiltonian, almost every (non-empty) compact energy level has a periodic orbit.