A new approach to superstability and finite time extinction of strongly continuous semigroups is presented, unifying known results and providing new criteria for these conditions to hold analogous to the well-known Pazy condition for stability. That finite time extinction implies superstability which is in turn equivalent to several (both known and new) conditions follow from this new approach in a consistent fashion. Examples that the converse statements fail are constructed, in particular, an answer to a question of Balakrishnan on superstable systems not exhibiting finite time extinction.

We prove that a rank-one transformation satisfying a condition called restricted growth is a mixing transformation if and only if the spacer sequence for the transformation is uniformly ergodic. Uniform ergodicity is a generalization of the notion of ergodicity for sequences, in the sense that the mean ergodic theorem holds for a family of what we call dynamical sequences. The application of our theorem shows that the class of polynomial rank-one transformations, rank-one transformations where the spacers are chosen to be the values of a polynomial with some mild conditions on the polynomials, that have restricted growth are mixing transformations implying in particular Adams’ result on staircase transformations. Another application yields a new proof that Ornstein’s class of rank-one transformations constructed using “random spacers” are almost surely mixing transformations.

Addenda and Errata

A rank-one transformation is defined by a sequence of positive integers, the sequence of cuts, and a dynamical sequence of nonnegative integers, the sequence of spacers, that are used to repeatedly cut and stack a single column. Our main result is that rank-one transformations satisfying a condition called restricted growth and such that the spacer sequence is uniformly ergodic with respect to the transformation are mixing transformations. This result and the related results presented in this exposition are to be presented in the paper above. The restricted growth condition limits the total variation in the spacer sequence and is a generalization of a condition, equivalent to restricted growth for staircase transformations, given by Adams, that is sufficient for staircase transformations to be mixing, while the uniform ergodicity of the spacer sequence is a generalization of the notion of uniform Cesaro transformations used by Adams to show mixing on staircases. The application of our concepts and results to a class of rank-one transformations, a class we call generalized staircase transformations, yields a variety of rank-one mixing transformations with explicit constructions.