Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

The Minkowski question mark function is a singular distribution function arising from Number Theory: it maps all quadratic irrationals to rational numbers and rational numbers to dyadic numbers. It generates a singular measure on [0,1]. We are interested in the behavior of the norms and recurrence coefficients of the orthonormal polynomials for this singular measure. Is the Minkowski measure a "regular" measure (in the sense of Ullman, Totik and Stahl), i.e., is the asymptotic zero distribution the equilibrium measure on [0,1] and do the n-th roots of the norm converge to the capacity (which is 1/4)? Do the recurrence coefficients converge (are the orthogonal polynomials in Nevai's class). We provide some numerical results which give some indication but which are not conclusive.

We will discuss the problem of restricting the Fourier transform to manifolds for which the curvature vanishes on some nonempty set. We will give background and discuss the problem in general terms, and then outline a proof of an essentially optimal (albeit conditional) result for a special class of hypersurfaces.

We consider generalized Bochner-Riesz multipliers $(1-\rho(\xi))_+^{\lambda}$ where $\rho(\xi)$ is the Minkowski functional of a convex domain in $\mathbb{R}^2$, with emphasis on domains for which the usual Carleson-Sj\"{o}lin $L^p$ bounds can be improved. We produce convex domains for which previous results due to Seeger and Ziesler are not sharp. For integers $m\ge 2$, we find domains such that $(1-\rho(\xi))_+^{\lambda}\in M^p(\mathbb{R}^2)$ for all $\lambda>0$ in the range $\frac{m}{m-1}\le p\le 2$, but for which $\inf\{\lambda:\,(1-\rho)_+^{\lambda}\in M_p\}>0$ when $p<\frac{m}{m-1}$. We identify two key properties of convex domains that lead to improved $L^p$ bounds for the associated Bochner-Riesz operators. First, we introduce the notion of the ``additive energy" of the boundary of a convex domain. Second, we associate a set of directions to a convex domain and define a sequence of Nikodym-type maximal operators corresponding to this set of directions. We show that domains that have low higher order energy, as well as those which have asymptotically good $L^p$ bounds for the corresponding sequence of Nikodym-type maximal operators, have improved $L^p$ bounds for the associated Bochner-Riesz operators over those proved by Seeger and Ziesler.