Marden's Tameness Conjecture: history and applications

Marden's Tameness Conjecture predicts that every hyperbolic 3-manifold with finitely generated fundamental group is homeomorphic to the interior of a compact 3-manifold. It was recently established by Agol and Calegari-Gabai. We will survey the history of work on this conjecture and discuss its many applications.Comment: 30 pages, expository article based on a lecture given at the conference on "Geometry, Topology and Analysis of Locally Symmetric Spaces and Discrete Groups'' held in Beijing in July 2007. Article was published in the proceedings of that conferenc

Topological restrictions on Anosov representations

We characterize groups admitting Anosov representations into $\mathsf{SL}(3,\mathbb R)$, projective Anosov representations into $\mathsf{SL}(4,\mathbb R)$, and Borel Anosov representations into $\mathsf{SL}(4,\mathbb R)$. More generally, we obtain bounds on the cohomological dimension of groups admitting $P_k$-Anosov representations into $\mathsf{SL}(d,\mathbb R)$ and offer several characterizations of Benoist representations

Simple length rigidity for Kleinian surface groups and applications

We prove that a Kleinian surface groups is determined, up to conjugacy in the isometry group of $\mathbb H^3$, by its simple marked length spectrum. As a first application, we show that a discrete faithful representation of the fundamental group of a compact, acylindrical, hyperbolizable 3-manifold $M$ is similarly determined by the translation lengths of images of elements of $\pi_1(M)$ represented by simple curves on the boundary of $M$. As a second application, we show the group of diffeomorphisms of quasifuchsian space which preserve the renormalized intersection number is generated by the (extended) mapping class group and complex conjugation

An improved bound for Sullivan's convex hull theorem

Sullivan showed that there exists $K_0$ such that if $\Omega\subset \hat{\mathbb{C}}$ is a simply connected hyperbolic domain, then there exists a conformally natural $K_0$-quasiconformal map from $\Omega$ to the boundary ${\rm Dome}(\Omega)$ of the convex hull of its complement which extends to the identity on $\partial\Omega$. Explicit upper and lower bounds on $K_0$ were obtained by Epstein, Marden, Markovic and Bishop. We improve on these bounds, by showing that one may choose $K_0\le 7.1695$.Comment: 24 pages, 5 figure