Category Archives: Surfaces

Harmonic measure

An amenable group acting by homeomorphisms on a compact topological space preserves a probability measure on ; in fact, one can given a definition of amenability in such terms. For example, if is finite, it preserves an atomic measure supported … Continue reading

Posted in Dynamics, Groups, Hyperbolic geometry, Surfaces | Tagged , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

The Goldman bracket

I was in Stony Brook last week, visiting Moira Chas and Dennis Sullivan, and have been away from blogging for a while; this week I plan to write a few posts about some of the things I discussed with Moira … Continue reading

Posted in Lie groups, Surfaces | Tagged , , , , , , | 5 Comments

Second variation formula for minimal surfaces

If is a smooth function on a manifold , and is a critical point of , recall that the Hessian is the quadratic form on (in local co-ordinates, the coefficients of the Hessian are the second partial derivatives of at … Continue reading

Posted in 3-manifolds, Surfaces | Tagged , , , , , , , | 11 Comments

Surface subgroups – more details from Jeremy Kahn

Jeremy Kahn kindly sent me a more detailed overview of his argument with Vlad Markovic, that I blogged earlier about here (also see Jesse Johnson’s blog for other commentary). With his permission, this is reproduced below in its entirety. Editorial … Continue reading

Posted in 3-manifolds, Ergodic Theory, Surfaces | Tagged , , , | 4 Comments

Surface subgroups in hyperbolic 3-manifolds

I just learned from Jesse Johnson’s blog that Vlad Markovic and Jeremy Kahn have announced a proof of the surface subgroup conjecture, that every complete hyperbolic -manifold contains a closed -injective surface. Equivalently, contains a closed surface subgroup. Apparently, Jeremy … Continue reading

Posted in 3-manifolds, Ergodic Theory, Surfaces | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 10 Comments

Faces of the scl norm ball

I am in Melbourne at the moment, in the middle of giving a lecture series, as part of the 2009 Clay-Mahler lectures (also see here). Yesterday I gave a lecture with the title “faces of the scl norm ball”, and … Continue reading

Posted in Dynamics, Groups, Surfaces | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment