The three gap theorem in higher dimensions
Ergodic Theory and Dynamical Systems Seminar
25th March 2021, 2:00 pm – 3:00 pm
Online via Zoom, (if interested, please email one of the organisers to gain access to the Zoom link)
Take a point on the unit circle and rotate it N times by a fixed angle. The N points thus generated partition the circle into N intervals. A beautiful fact, first conjectured by Hugo Steinhaus in the 1950s and proved independently by Vera Sós, János Surányi and Stanisław Świerczkowski, is that for any choice of N, no matter how large, these intervals can have at most three distinct lengths. In this lecture I will explore an interpretation of the three gap theorem in terms of the space of Euclidean lattices, which will produce various new results in higher dimensions, including gaps in the fractional parts of linear forms and nearest neighbour distances in multi-dimensional Kronecker sequences. The lecture is based on joint work with Alan Haynes (Houston) and Andreas Strömbergsson (Uppsala).
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