Boris Hassellblatt

Geodesic flows provided the original examples in the quest for the
Maxwell-Boltzmann ergodic hypothesis, which aimed to lay a foundation
under statistical mechanics. They have been the only flows of
"mechanical" origin that exhibit the uniform sensitivity on initial
conditions from which this
pseudorandom behavior arises. We show that even in dimension 3 the
world of such flows is vastly larger via a surgery construction that
produces flows
not topologically equivalent to any algebraic flow. This includes examples
on many hyperbolic 3-manifolds, any of which have remarkable dynamical
and geometric properties.