this talk will explore the connection between diophantine approximation and the theory of homogeneous dynamics. the first part of the talk will be used to define and study the minimal denominator function (mdf). we compute the limiting distribution of the mdf as one of its parameters tends to zero. we do this by relating the function to the space of unimodular lattices on the plane.

the second part of the talk will be devoted to describing equivariant processes. this will give a general framework to generalize the main theorem in two directions:

1. higher dimensional diophantine approximation

2. statistics of short saddle connections of veech surfaces

if time allows, we will compute formulas for the statistics of short holonomy vectors of translation surfaces.