Abstract : An early motivation of smooth ergodic theory was to provide a mathematical account for the unpredictable, chaotic behavior of real-world fluids. While many interesting questions remain, in the last 25 years significant progress has been achieved in understanding models of fluid mechanics, e.g., the Navier-Stokes equations, in the presence of stochastic driving. Noise is natural for modeling purposes, and certain kinds of noise have a regularizing effect on asymptotic statistics. These kinds of noise provide an effective technical tool for rendering tractable otherwise inaccessible results on chaotic regimes, e.g., positivity of Lyapunov exponents and the presence of a strange attractor supporting a physical (SRB) measure. In this talk I will describe some of my work in this vein, including a recent result with Jacob Bedrossian and Sam Punshon-Smith providing positive Lyapunov exponents for f inite-dimensional (a.k.a. Galerkin) truncations of the Navier-Stokes equations.

Keywords : Fluid mechanics; Lyapunov exponents; stochastic differential equations; hypoellipticity