Thurston's ending lamination conjecture proposes that a finitely-generated Kleinian group is uniquely determined (up to isometry) by the topology of its quotient and a list of invariants that describe the asymptotic geometry of its ends. We present a proof of this conjecture for punctured-torus groups. These are free two-generator Kleinian groups with parabolic commutator, which should be thought of as representations of the fundamental group of a punctured torus.

As a consequence we verify the conjectural topological description of the deformation space of punctured-torus groups (including Bers' conjecture that the quasi-Fuchsian groups are dense in this space) and prove a rigidity theorem: two punctured-torus groups are quasi-conformally conjugate if and only if they are topologically conjugate.

Let $f: \pi \rightarrow \pi$ be a homeomorphism of the plane $\pi$. We define open sets $P$, called $\textit {pruning fronts}$ after the work of Cvitanović, for which it is possible to construct an isotopy $H: \pi \times [0,1] \rightarrow \pi$ with open support contained in $\bigcup _{n \in {\mathbb{Z}} } f^{n} (P)$ such that $H(\cdot, 0 ) = f(\cdot)$ and $H(\cdot, 1) = f_{P} (\cdot)$, where $f_P$ is a homeomorphism under which every point of $P$ is wandering. Applying this construction with $f$ being Smale's horseshoe, it is possible to obtain an uncountable family of homeomorphisms, depending on infinitely many parameters, going from trivial to chaotic dynamic behaviour. This family is a 2-dimensional analog of a 1-dimensional universal family.

Local scaling of a set means that in a neighborhood of a point the structure of the set can be mapped into a finer scale structure of the set. These scaling transformations are compact sets of locally affine (that is: with uniformly $\alpha$-Hölder continuous derivatives) contractions. In this setting, without any assumption on the spacing of these contractions such as the open set condition, we show that the measure of the set is an upper semi-continuous of the scaling transformation in the $C^0$-topology. With a restriction on the 'non-conformality' (see below) the Hausdorff dimension is lower semi-continous function in the $C^{1}$-topology. We include some examples to show that neither of these notions is continuous.

We define a two-sided analog of Erdös measure on the space of two-sided expansions with respect to the powers of the golden ratio, or, equivalently, the Erdös measure on the 2-torus. We construct the transformation (goldenshift) preserving both Erdös and Lebesgue measures on $T^2$ which is the induced automorphism with respect to the ordinary shift (or the corresponding Fibonacci toral automorphism) and proves to be Bernoulli with respect to both measures in question. This provides a direct way to obtain formulas for the entropy dimension of the Erdös measure on the interval, its entropy in the sense of Garsia-Alexander-Zagier and some other results. Besides, we study central measures on the Fibonacci graph, the dynamics of expansions and related questions.