Mathematics Colloquia and Seminars

Return to Colloquia & Seminar listing

Geodesics track random walks in Teichmuller space

Geometry/Topology

Speaker: Moon Duchin, UCDavis
Location: 693 Kerr
Start time: Wed, Oct 5 2005, 4:10PM

We show that almost all random walk trajectories on the mapping class group are well-approximable by Teichmuller geodesic rays. This adapts a similar result of Karlsson and Margulis (1999) -- a version of the Oseledec multiplicative ergodic theorem -- which they proved for Busemann nonpositively curved spaces. In place of this curvature condition (which fails for Teichmuller space), we prove a new comparison-triangle result for the Teichmuller metric.