I will give an overview of recent work with P. Brosnan on the asymptotic behavior of archimedean heights, and with C. Peters on the differential geometry of mixed period domains.

A (countable discrete) group $\Gamma$ acting on a compact space $X$ is said to act \emph{amenably} if there is a continuous net $(\mu_n^x)$ of probability measures indexed by the points of $X$ that are almost invariant under the action of $\Gamma$. For example, $\Gamma$ is amenable if and only if it acts amenably on a one-point space. The protoypical example of a boundary amenable non-amenable group is a non-abelian free group. More generally, if acts properly, isometrically, and transitively on a tree, then $\Gamma$ is boundary amenable. In this talk, I will present a construction of the Stone-Cech compactification of a locally compact space using C*-algebra ultrapowers that allows one to give a slick proof of the aforementioned result. This construction is motivated by the open question as to whether or not Thompson’s group is boundary amenable and I will also discuss the optimistic thought that this construction could be used to settle that problem.

The Littlewood conjecture states that $\liminf_{n\to\infty}||n\alpha|| ||n\beta|=0|$ holds for all real numbers $\alpha$ and $\alpha$, where $||\cdot||$ denotes the distance to the nearest integer. There are several other formulations of Littlewood conjecture, including the $p$-adic and mixed Littlewood conjecture. In this talk, I start with an introduction to the history of different versions of Littlewood conjecture.  Then I will present several refined results of mixed Littlewood conjecture for pseudo-absolute values.
Let $\mathcal{D}_1$,$\mathcal{D}_2,\cdots, \mathcal{D}_k$ be $k$ pseudo absolute sequences and define the  $\mathcal{D}$-adic norm $|\cdot|_{\mathcal{D}}:\N\to \{n_k^{-1}:k\ge 0\}$ by $|{n}|_\mathcal{D} = \min\{ n_k^{-1} : n\in  n_k\Z \}.$
Under some minor condition of $\mathcal{D}_1$,$\mathcal{D}_2,\cdots, \mathcal{D}_k$,  I set up the criteria of sequence $\psi(n)$ such that for almost every $\alpha$ the inequality
\begin{equation*}
    |n|_{\mathcal{D}_1}|n|_{\mathcal{D}_2}\cdots |n|_{\mathcal{D}_k}||n\alpha||\leq \psi(n)
\end{equation*}
has infinitely many solutions for $n\in\N$. Under some minor condition of the pseudo absolute sequence $\mathcal{D}$, I also show that
for any $\alpha\in\R$, $\liminf_{n\to \infty}n|n|_a|n|_\mathcal{D}\|n\alpha\|=0.$

Polynomial dynamical systems over finite fields or rings provide a useful tool for studying network dynamics, such as those of gene regulatory networks. In this talk, I will discuss linear dynamical systems over finite commutative rings. The limit cycles of a linear dynamical system over a finite field can be described by using the elementary divisors of the corresponding matrix. The extension of the study to a general finite commutative ring is natural and has applications. To address the difficulties in the commutative ring setting, we developed a computational approach. In an earlier work, we gave an efficient algorithm to determine whether such a system over a finite commutative ring is a fixed-point system or not. In a more recent work, we further analyzed the structure of such a system and provided a method to determine its limit cycles.