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The present paper is devoted to the theory of discontinuous Markoff processes, that is processes where the transitions between states take place either by “jumps” of some specified kind, or by other means. States are taken as point$x$in an abstract space;$phases$are points ($x, t$) in the product state×time space; sets of states are denoted by$X$, sets of phases by$S$.

We study the ergodic properties of fibered rational maps of the Riemann sphere. In particular we compute the topological entropy of such mappings and construct a measure of maximal relative entropy. The measure is shown to be the unique one with this property. We apply the results to selfmaps of ruled surfaces and to certain holomorphic mapping of the complex projective plane$P$^{2}.

In this note we establish some general finiteness results concerning lattices Γ in connected Lie groups$G$which possess certain “density” properties (see$Moskowitz$, M., On the density theorems of Borel and Furstenberg,$Ark. Mat.$$16$(1978), 11–27, and$Moskowitz$, M., Some results on automorphisms of bounded displacement and bounded cocycles,$Monatsh. Math.$$85$(1978), 323–336). For such groups we show that Γ always has finite index in its normalizer$N$_{$G$}(Γ). We then investigate analogous questions for the automorphism group Aut($G$) proving, under appropriate conditions, that Stab_{Aut($G$)}(Γ) is discrete. Finally we show, under appropriate conditions, that the subgroup $\tilde{\Gamma}=\{i_{\gamma}:\gamma \in \Gamma \},\ i_{\gamma}(x)=\gamma x\gamma^{-1}$ , of Aut($G$) has finite index in Stab_{Aut($G$)}(Γ). We test the limits of our results with various examples and counterexamples.