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>>11608342 An irrational rotation of the circle R/Z, T: x x + ?, where ? is irrational, is ergodic. This transformation has even stronger properties of unique ergodicity, minimality, and equidistribution. By contrast, if ? = p/q is rational (in lowest terms) then T is periodic, with period q, and thus cannot be ergodic: for any interval I of length a, 0 < a < 1/q, its orbit under T (that is, the union of I, T(I), ..., Tq?1(I), which contains the image of I under any number of applications of T) is a T-invariant mod 0 set that is a union of q intervals of length a, hence it has measure qa strictly between 0 and 1.
Let G be a compact abelian group, ? the normalized Haar measure, and T a group automorphism of G. Let G* be the Pontryagin dual group, consisting of the continuous characters of G, and T* be the corresponding adjoint automorphism of G*. The automorphism T is ergodic if and only if the equality (T*)n(?) = ? is possible only when n = 0 or ? is the trivial character of G. In particular, if G is the n-dimensional torus and the automorphism T is represented by a unimodular matrix A then T is ergodic if and only if no eigenvalue of A is a root of unity.
A Bernoulli shift is ergodic. More generally, ergodicity of the shift transformation associated with a sequence of i.i.d. random variables and some more general stationary processes follows from Kolmogorov's zero–one law.
