Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge / 2017 / ii / Paper 4 / 25J / c

The Birkhoff ergodic theorem states: for a measure-preserving transformation $\theta$ of a finite measure space and $f\in L^1$, the averages $A_{n}f=n^{-1}{\sum }_{j=0}^{n-1}f\circ {\theta }^j$ converge almost everywhere and in $L^1$ to an invariant function $f^{\ast }$. On a probability space,where $\mathcal{I}$ is the invariant sigma-algebra modulo null sets. In particular the integral is preserved, and if $\theta$ is ergodic then $f^{\ast }=\int fd\mu$ almost everywhere; for a finite space of nonunit mass, this constant is $\mu (E{)}^{-1}\int fd\mu$ when $\mu (E)>0$.

The maximal ergodic lemma says that for real integrable $f$, with $S_{k}f={\sum }_{j=0}^{k-1}f\circ {\theta }^j$ and $E_N=\{{\max }_{1\le k\le N}{S}_{k}f>0\}$,The same inequality holds on $E_{\infty }=\{{\sup }_{k\ge 1}{S}_{k}f>0\}$, by taking the increasing limit and dominated convergence. These statements do not require the transformation to be invertible or the space to be ergodic.