Hyperbolicity and Recurrence in Dynamical Systems: a Survey of Recent Results

We discuss selected topics of current research interest in the theory of dynamical systems, with emphasis on dimension theory, multifractal analysis, and quantitative recurrence. The topics include the quantitative versus the qualitative behavior of Poincaré recurrence, the product structure of invariant measures and return times, the dimension of invariant sets and invariant measures, the complexity of the level sets of local quantities from the point of view of Hausdorff dimension, and the conditional variational principles as well as their applications to problems in number theory. We present the foundations of each area, and discuss recent developments and applications. All the necessary notions from ergodic theory, hyperbolic dynamics, dimension theory, and the thermodynamic formalism are briefly recalled. We concentrate on uniformly hyperbolic dynamics, although we also refer to nonuniformly hyperbolic dynamics. Instead of always presenting the most general results, we made a selection with the purpose of illustrating the main ideas while we avoid the accessory technicalities.