Alexander Bufetov got his Diploma in Mathematics at the Independent University of Moscow in 1999 and his PhD at Princeton University in 2005. After one year as a Postdoctoral student at the University of Chicago, he was employed as an Assistant Professor at Rice University where he also held the 'Edgar Odell Lovett Junior Chair'. In 2009, Alexander Bufetov joined the Steklov Mathematical Institute where he passed his habilitation thesis in order to supervise PhD students. In 2012, he became a CNRS Senior Researcher for the LATP (Laboratoire d'Analyse, Topologie, Probabilités) department at Aix-Marseille University.
Alexander Bufetov has received several prizes: a Prize by Moscow Mathematical Society in 2005, a grant by the Sloan Foundation and a grant from the President of the Russian Federation in 2010 and also a grant from the Simons Foundation at the Independent University of Moscow in 2011.
His research area is the Ergodic theory of dynamical systems.[-]

A (pseudo)-Anosov flow on a 3-manifold can be understood through its orbit space, a bifoliated plane with a natural action of the fundamental group of the manifold. In this minicourse, we will describe techniques to study the dynamics of these orbit space actions as a means to understand the topological theory and the classification of (pseudo)Anosov flows in dimension 3. This leads to a more general theory of 'Anosov-like' actions on bifoliated planes, which form a rich class of discrete dynamical systems including but not limited to the orbit space actions from flows.[-]

We will introduce some tools from analysis (in particular microlocal analysis) in order to understand the Fredholm theory of Anosov flows. We will then explain how these tools can be used to study a rigidity problem consisting in determining a Riemannian metric from the lengths of its marked closed geodesics, and we will describe a variational approach to study this problem locally near a fixed negatively curved Riemannian metric on a closed manifold.[-]

A (pseudo)-Anosov flow on a 3-manifold can be understood through its orbit space, a bifoliated plane with a natural action of the fundamental group of the manifold. In this minicourse, we will describe techniques to study the dynamics of these orbit space actions as a means to understand the topological theory and the classification of (pseudo)Anosov flows in dimension 3. This leads to a more general theory of 'Anosov-like' actions on bifoliated planes, which form a rich class of discrete dynamical systems including but not limited to the orbit space actions from flows.[-]