We extend two results about the ordinary continued fraction expansion to best simultaneous Diophantine approximations of vectors or matrices. The first is Levy-Khintchin Theorem about the almost sure growth rate of the denominators of the convergents. The second is a Theorem of Bosma, Hendrik and Wiedijk about the almost sure limit distribution of the sequence of products q_n d(q_n θ,Z) where the qn's are the denominators of the convergents associated with the real number θ by the ordinary continued fraction algorithm. Beside these two main results, we show that when d≥2, for almost all vectors θ∈R^d, lim inf_{n→∞} q_{n+k} d(q_n θ,Z^d)=0 for all positive integers k, where (q_n)_{n∈N} is the sequence of best approximation denominators of θ.

The commonly used spatial entropy hr(U) of the multi-dimensional shift space U is the limit of growth rate of admissible local patterns on finite rectangular sublattices which expands to whole space Zd, d ≥ 2. This work studies spatial entropy hΩ(U) of shift space U on general expanding system Ω = {Ω(n)}∞ n=1 where Ω(n) is increasing finite sublattices and expands to Zd. Ω is called genuinely d-dimensional if Ω(n) contains no lower-dimensional part whose size is comparable to that of its d-dimensional part. We show that hr(U) is the supremum of hΩ(U) for all genuinely two-dimensional Ω. Furthermore, when Ω is genuinely d-dimensional and satisfies certain conditions, then hΩ(U) = hr(U). On the contrary, when Ω(n) contains a lower-dimensional part, then hr(U) < hΩ(U) for some U. Therefore, hr(U) is appropriate to be the d-dimensional spatial entropy.

For two-sided topological Markov chains, we show that the set of points for which the two-sided Birkhoff averages of a continuous function diverge is residual. We also show that the set of points for which the Birkhoff averages have a given set of accumulation points other than a singleton is residual. A nontrivial consequence of our results is that the set of points for which the local entropies of an invariant measure on a locally maximal hyperbolic set does not exist is residual. This strongly contrasts to the Shannon–McMillan–Breiman theorem in the context of ergodic theory, which says that local entropies exist on a full measure set.

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The Birkhoff conjecture says that the boundary of a strictly convex integrable billiard table is necessarily an ellipse. In this article, we consider a stronger notion of integrability, namely integrability close to the boundary, and prove a local version of this conjecture: a small perturbation of an ellipse of small eccentricity which preserves integrability near the boundary, is itself an ellipse. This extends the result in Avila et al. (Ann Math 184:527–558, ADK16), where integrability was assumed on a larger set. In particular, it shows that (local) integrability near the boundary implies global integrability. One of the crucial ideas in the proof consists in analyzing Taylor expansion of the corresponding action-angle coordinates with respect to the eccentricity parameter, deriving and studying higher order conditions for the preservation of integrable rational caustics.