Pure Maths Colloquium - Word-hyperbolic surface bundles - Prof Chris Leininger (U of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) Seminar

Event details

Abstract: Thurston's geometrization program revolutionized the study of 3-manifolds, and hyperbolic geometry became the primary tool in the study of these manifolds. Soon after Gromov extracted the key features of hyperbolic geometry to study more general spaces---most importantly, finitely generated groups---and he has asked whether the analogue of the "hyperbolic part" of Thurston's geometrization holds for groups. In this talk I will explain a bit about Thurston's work, Gromov's generalization, and then describe a particular instance of Gromov's "hyperbolization question", motivated by Thurston's approach, and explain some partial results in this direction. This is joint work with Bestvina, Bromberg, and Kent.