Fixing Einstein's equations

Einstein's equations for general relativity, when viewed as a dynamical system for evolving initial data, have a serious flaw: they cannot be proven to be well-posed (except in special coordinates). That is, they do not produce unique solutions that depend smoothly on the initial data. To remedy this failing, there has been widespread interest recently in reformulating Einstein's theory as a hyperbolic system of differential equations. The physical and geometrical content of the original theory remain unchanged, but dynamical evolution is made sound. Here we present a new hyperbolic formulation in terms of $g_{ij}$, $K_{ij}$, and \bGam_{kij} that is strikingly close to the space-plus-time (``3+1'') form of Einstein's original equations. Indeed, the familiarity of its constituents make the existence of this formulation all the more unexpected. This is the most economical first-order symmetrizable hyperbolic formulation presently known to us that has only physical characteristic speeds, either zero or the speed of light, for all (non-matter) variables. This system clarifies the relationships between Einstein's original equations and the Einstein-Ricci and Frittelli-Reula hyperbolic formulations of general relativity and establishes links to other hyperbolic formulations.Comment: 8 pages, revte

The topology of deformation spaces of Kleinian groups

Let M be a compact, hyperbolizable 3-manifold with nonempty incompressible boundary and let AH(\pi_1(M)) denote the space of (conjugacy classes of) discrete faithful representations of \pi_1(M) into PSL 2 (C). The components of the interior MP(\pi_1(M)) of AH(\pi_1(M)) (as a subset of the appropriate representation variety) are enumerated by the space A(M) of marked homeomorphism types of oriented, compact, irreducible 3-manifolds homotopy equivalent to M. In this paper, we give a topological enumeration of the components of the closure of MP(\pi_1(M)) and hence a conjectural topological enumeration of the components of AH(\pi_1(M)). We do so by characterizing exactly which changes of marked homeomorphism type can occur in the algebraic limit of a sequence of isomorphic freely indecomposable Kleinian groups. We use this enumeration to exhibit manifolds M for which AH(\pi_1(M)) has infinitely many components.Comment: 49 pages, published versio

Uniformly exponential growth and mapping class groups of surfaces

We show that the mapping class group of an orientable finite type surface has uniformly exponential growth, as well as various closely related groups. This provides further evidence that mapping class groups may be linear.Comment: 6 pages, no figure