PIMS UAlberta Distinguished Speaker: Hanfeng Li

Entropy is one of the most important invariants in dynamical systems, in both measure-theoretic and topological settings. The original Kolmogorov-Sinai entropy was introduced for integer group actions in the late 1950s and extended to amenable group actions in the 1970s.

After the break-through of Lewis Bowen in 2010, there is now a well-founded theory of entropy for actions of sofic groups. I will discuss the definition of sofic entropy, its application to Gottschalk's surjunctivity conjecture, and connection to the Fuglede-Kadison determinant in operator algebras.