Theorem 1. The Chacon transformation is not recurrent for the sequence ( 3 1).

m+1

1 2

Proof: We begin by briey describing the the well-known construction of Chacns map T . It is a rank one construction obtained as follows. Start with [0, 1), o 1 cut it into three intervals of length 3 labelled a, b, c from left to right, take another 1 interval of length 3 labelled s (for spacer) and stack them above each other in the order a, b, s, c reading from bottom to top. This gives a tower 1 of intervals of height 4 and T is now partially dened on this set by mapping every point in a level to the point directly above it in the tower, except for the top level where T remains undened. Now suppose that the tower n has been dened with height hn and width 3n . We slice n into 3 towers of width 3n1 , label these a, b, c, take a disjoint interval of width 3n1 considered as a tower of height 1 labelled s and stack these 4 towers above each other in the order a, b, s, c to obtain the tower n+1 . In the limit T will n+1 be dened on a union of intervals with nite total measure. We let hn = 3 2 1 denote the height of n . Now let E be the spacer level added at the rst stage of the construction. The symbolic dynamics for E can be described as follows. Obviously if x is any point in the base level of 1 its E-name of length h1 is B1 = 0010 and if Bn is the name (of length hn ) of a point in the base of n then Bn+1 is the concatention Bn Bn 0Bn . Now x n, let k > 0 and consider Bn+k , which is a concatenation of copies of Bn with the occasional 0 interposed between adjacent copies, together with its shift by hn 1. Each copy of Bn in Bn+k is paired with a copy of Bn in the shift of Bn+k such that the relative shift between these two copies is either 1 or 2. Since any two occurences of a 1 in Bn are evidently separated by at least three 0s we see that Bn+k and its shift by hn 1 have no common occurences of a 1. Since this holds for all k > 0 it follows that E T hn1 E = as desired.