Systolic inequalities in metric and symplectic geometry

Abstract: The prototypical question of metric systolic geometry is to give upper bounds on the length of the shortest closed geodesics on a closed Riemannian manifold in terms of its volume. Systolic questions have a natural generalization to conservative dynamical systems, in which closed geodesics are replaced by periodic orbits, length by period and volume by phase space volume. This generalization turns out to be quite fruitful: on the one hand, symplectic methods allow us to solve some long standing questions in metric systolic geometry, on the other hand many interesting new questions arise. These new questions are related to challenging open problems in symplectic and in convex geometry. This talk is based on joint works with Gabriele Benedetti, Barney Bramham, Umberto Hryniewicz and Pedro Salomão.