Bounded remainder sets for a dynamical system are sets for which the Birkhoff averages of return times differ from the expected values by at most a constant amount. These sets are rare and important objects which have been studied for over 100 years. In the last few years there have been a number of results which culminated in explicit constructions of bounded remainder sets for toral rotations in any dimension, of all possible allowable volumes. In this talk we are going to explain these results, and then explain how to generalize them to give explicit constructions of bounded remainder sets for rotations in $p$-adic solenoids. Our method of proof will make use of a natural dynamical encoding of patterns in non-Archimedean cut and project sets.[-]

Let $\alpha$ $\epsilon$ $\mathbb{R}^d$ be a vector whose entries $\alpha_1, . . . , \alpha_d$ and $1$ are linearly independent over the rationals. We say that $S \subset \mathbb{T}^d$ is a bounded remainder set for the sequence of irrational rotations $\lbrace n\alpha\rbrace_{n\geqslant1}$ if the discrepancy
$ \sum_{k=1}^{N}1_S (\lbrace k\alpha\rbrace) - N$ $mes(S)$
is bounded in absolute value as $N \to \infty$. In one dimension, Hecke, Ostrowski and Kesten characterized the intervals with this property.
We will discuss the bounded remainder property for sets in higher dimensions. In particular, we will see that parallelotopes spanned by vectors in $\mathbb{Z}\alpha + \mathbb{Z}^d$ have bounded remainder. Moreover, we show that this condition can be established by exploiting a connection between irrational rotation on $\mathbb{T}^d$ and certain cut-and-project sets. If time allows, we will discuss bounded remainder sets for the continuous irrational rotation $\lbrace t \alpha : t$ $\epsilon$ $\mathbb{R}^+\rbrace$ in two dimensions.[-]

We recall some classical results for uniform distribution modulo one, and relate them with their counterparts in the "localized" setting of correlation functions and gap statistics. We discuss the difficulties arising from the localized setting, with a particular emphasis on questions concerning the almost everywhere behavior of parametric sequences. It turns out that in this metric setting one is naturally led to a Diophantine counting problem, which has interesting connections to additive combinatorics and to moment bounds for the Riemann zeta function.[-]

We will discuss a new type of ergodic theorem which has among its corollaries numerous classical results from multiplicative number theory, including the Prime Number Theorem, a theorem of Pillai-Selberg and a theorem of Erdös-Delange. This ergodic approach leads to a new dynamical framework for a general form of Sarnak's Möbius disjointness conjecture which focuses on the "joint independence" of actions of (N,+) and (N,x). The talk is based on recent joint work with Florian Richter.[-]