View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by OpenstarTs Rend. Istit. Mat. Univ. Trieste Vol. XXXVII, 1–38 (2005) A Crash Course on Kleinian Groups Caroline Series (∗) Summary. - These notes formed part of the ICTP summer school on Geometry and Topology of 3-manifolds in June 2006. Assum- ing only a minimal knowledge of hyperbolic geometry, the aim was to provide a rapid introduction to the modern picture of Kleinian groups. The subject has recently made dramatic progress with spectacular proofs of the Density Conjecture, the Ending Lami- nation Conjecture and the Tameness Conjecture. Between them, these three new theorems make possible a complete geometric clas- sification of all hyperbolic 3-manifolds. The goal is to explain the background needed to appreciate the statements and significance of these remarkable results. Introduction A Kleinian group is a discrete group of isometries of hyperbolic 3- space H3. Any hyperbolic 3-manifold is the quotient of H3 by a Kleinian group. In the 1960s, the school of Ahlfors and Bers studied Kleinian groups mainly analytically, in terms of their action on the Riemann sphere. Thurston revolutionised the subject in the 1970s by taking a more topological viewpoint and showing that in a certain sense ‘many’ 3-manifolds, perhaps one could say ‘most’, are hyper- bolic. He also introduced many wonderful new concepts, some of which we shall meet here. In the last five years, our understanding of Kleinian groups has advanced by leaps and bounds with the proofs of three great conjec- tures: the Density Conjecture, the Ending Lamination Conjecture (∗) Author’s Address: Caroline Series, Mathematics Insitute, University of War- wick, Coventry CV4 7AL, England, email:
[email protected].