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

2 \pi-grafting and complex projective structures, I

Let $S$ be a closed oriented surface of genus at least two. Gallo, Kapovich, and Marden asked if 2\pi-graftings produce all projective structures on $S$ with arbitrarily fixed holonomy (Grafting Conjecture). In this paper, we show that the conjecture holds true "locally" in the space $GL$ of geodesic laminations on $S$ via a natural projection of projective structures on $S$ into $GL$ in the Thurston coordinates. In the sequel paper, using this local solution, we prove the conjecture for generic holonomy.Comment: 57 pages, 10 figures. To appear in Geometry & Topolog

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