Katok [Lyapunov exponents, entropy and periodic points of diffeomorphisms. Publ. Math. Inst. Hautes Études Sci. 51 (1980), 137–173] conjectured that every $C^{2}$ diffeomorphism f on a Riemannian manifold has the intermediate entropy property, that is, for any constant $c \in [0, h_{\mathrm {top}}(f))$, there exists an ergodic measure $\mu $ of f satisfying $h_{\mu }(f)=c$. In this paper, we obtain a conditional intermediate metric entropy property and two conditional intermediate Birkhoff average properties for basic sets of flows that characterize the refined roles of ergodic measures in the invariant ones. In this process, we establish a ‘multi-horseshoe’ entropy-dense property and use it to get the goal combined with conditional variational principles. We also obtain the same result for singular hyperbolic attractors.

In this paper we investigate the Margulis–Ruelle inequality for general Riemannian manifolds (possibly non-compact and with a boundary) and show that it always holds under an integrable condition.

We revisit an old topic in algorithms, the deterministic walk on a finite graph which always moves toward the nearest unvisited vertex until every vertex is visited. There is an elementary connection between this cover time and ball-covering (metric entropy) measures. For some familiar models of random graphs, this connection allows the order of magnitude of the cover time to be deduced from first passage percolation estimates. Establishing sharper results seems a challenging problem.

We characterize the geometry of a path in a sub-Riemannian manifold using two metric invariants, the entropy and the complexity. The entropy of a subset A of a metric space is the minimum number of balls of a given radius ε needed to cover A. It allows one to compute the Hausdorff dimension in some cases and to bound it from above in general. We define the complexity of a path in a sub-Riemannian manifold as the infimum of the lengths of all trajectories contained in an ε-neighborhood of the path, having the same extremities as the path. The concept of complexity for paths was first developed to model the algorithmic complexity of the nonholonomic motion planning problem in robotics. In this paper, our aim is to estimate the entropy, Hausdorff dimension and complexity for a path in a general sub-Riemannian manifold. We construct first a norm $\| \cdot \|_{\varepsilon}$ on the tangent space that depends on a parameter ε > 0. Our main result states then that the entropy of a path is equivalent to the integral of this ε-norm along the path. As a corollary we obtain upper and lower bounds for the Hausdorff dimension of a path. Our second main result is that complexity and entropy are equivalent for generic paths. We give also a computable sufficient condition on the path for this equivalence to happen.

We establish new exponential inequalities for partial sums of random fields. Next, using classicalchaining arguments, we give sufficient conditions for partial sum processes indexed by large classes ofsets to converge to a set-indexed Brownian motion. For stationary fields of bounded random variables, thecondition is expressed in terms of a series of conditional expectations. For non-uniform ϕ-mixingrandom fields, we require both finite fourth moments and an algebraic decay of the mixing coefficients.