A descriptive set theorist's proof of the pointwise ergodic theorem

Abstract

We give a short combinatorial proof of the classical pointwise ergodic theorem for probability measure preserving $\mathbb{Z}$-actions. Our approach reduces the theorem to a tiling problem: tightly tile each orbit by intervals with desired averages. This tiling problem is easy to solve for $\mathbb{Z}$ with intervals as tiles. However, it would be interesting to find other classes of groups and sequences of tiles for which this can be done, since then our approach would yield a pointwise ergodic theorem for such classes.