The applications of renormalization ideas in Dynamical Systems became increasingly popular after 1979, and, since then, they played an important role in the study of several classes of low-dimensional systems.Very roughly speaking, the philosophy of renormalization is that, after appropriate rescalings, the long time behaviors at short scales of certain systems are dictated by other systems within a fixed class S of systems. In particular, such a renormalization procedure can iterated and, as it turns out, the phrase portraits of those systems whose successive renormalizations tend to stay in a compact portion of S can often be reasonably described (”plough in the dynamical plane to harvest in the parameter space”, A. Douady).In this minicourse, we shall illustrate these ideas by explaining the com-mon strategy of ”recurrence of renormalization to compact sets” behind two different results:
1.the solutions of Masur and Veech in 1982 to Keane's conjecture of unique ergodicity of almost all interval exchange transformations;
2. the solution of Moreira–Yoccoz in 2001 to Palis' conjecture on the prevalence of stable intersections of pairs of dynamical Cantor sets whose Hausdorff dimensions are large.[-]