Title: Dynamics of Distal Actions on Locally Compact Groups
by Riddhi Shah (Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India) as part of Topological Groups

Lecture held in Elysium.

Abstract
Distal maps were introduced by David Hilbert on compact spaces to study non-ergodic maps. A homeomorphism T on a topological space X is said to be distal if the closure of every double T-orbit of (x, y) does not intersect the diagonal in X x X unless x=y. Similarly, a semigroup S of homeomorphisms of X is said to act distally on X if the closure of every S-orbit of (x,y) does not intersect the diagonal unless x=y. We discuss some properties of distal actions of automorphisms on locally compact groups and on homogeneous spaces given by quotients modulo closed invariant subgroups which are either compact or normal. We relate distality to the behaviour of orbits. We also characterise the behaviour of convolution powers of probability measures on the group in terms of the distality of inner automorphisms.