kleinian, a tool for visualizing Kleinian groups

It’s been a while since I last blogged; the reason, of course, is that I felt that I couldn’t post anything new before completing my series of posts on Kähler groups; but I wasn’t quite ready to write my last post, because I wanted to get to the bottom of a few analytic details in the notorious Gromov-Schoen paper. I am not quite at the bottom yet, but maybe closer than I was; but I’m still pretty far from having collected my thoughts to the point where I can do them justice in a post. So I’ve finally decided to put Kähler groups on the back burner for now, and resume my usual very sporadic blogging habits.

So the purpose of this blog post is to advertise that I wrote a little piece of software called kleinian which uses the GLUT tools to visualize Kleinian groups (or, more accurately, interesting hyperbolic polyhedra invariant under such groups). The software can be downloaded from my github repository at

https://github.com/dannycalegari/kleinian

and then compiled from the command line with “make”. It should work out of the box on OS X; Alden Walker tells me he has successfully gotten it to compile on (Ubuntu) Linux, which required tinkering with the makefile a bit, and installing freeglut3-dev. There is a manual on the github page with a detailed description of file formats and so on.

Kähler manifolds and groups, part 2

In this post I hope to start talking in a bit more depth about the global geometry of compact Kähler manifolds and their covers. Basic references for much of this post are the book Fundamental groups of compact Kähler manifolds by Amoros-Burger-Corlette-Kotschick-Toledo, and the paper Kähler hyperbolicity and L2 Hodge theory by Gromov. It turns out that there is a basic distinction in the world of compact Kähler manifolds between those that admit a holomorphic surjection with connected fibers to a compact Riemann surface of genus at least 2, and those that don’t. The existence or non-existence of such a fibration turns out to depend only on the fundamental group of the manifold, and in fact only on the algebraic structure of the cup product on ; thus one talks about fibered or nonfibered Kähler groups.

If X is a connected CW complex, by successively attaching cells of dimension 3 and higher to X we may obtain a CW complex Y for which the inclusion of X into Y induces an isomorphism on fundamental groups, while the universal cover of Y is contractible (i.e. Y is a with the fundamental group of X). The (co)-homology of Y is (by definition) the group (co)-homology of the fundamental group of X. Since Y is obtained from X by attaching cells of dimension at least 3, the map induced by inclusion is an isomorphism in dimension 0 and 1, and an injection in dimension 2 (dually, the map is a surjection, whose kernel is the image of under the Hurewicz map; so the cokernel of measures the pairing of the 2-dimensional cohomology of X with essential 2-spheres).

A surjective map f from a space X to a space S with connected fibers is surjective on fundamental groups. This basically follows from the long exact sequence in homotopy groups for a fibration; more prosaically, first note that 1-manifolds in S can be lifted locally to 1-manifolds in X, then distinct lifts of endpoints of small segments can be connected in their fibers in X. A surjection on fundamental groups induces an injection on in the other direction, and by naturality of cup product, if is a subspace of on which the cup product vanishes identically — i.e. if it is isotropic — then is also isotropic. If S is a closed oriented surface of genus g then cup product makes into a symplectic vector space of (real) dimension 2g, and any Lagrangian subspace V is isotropic of dimension g. Thus: a surjective map with connected fibers from a space X to a closed Riemann surface S of genus at least 2 gives rise to an isotropic subspace of of dimension at least 2.

So in a nutshell: the purpose of this blog post is to explain how the existence of isotropic subspaces in 1-dimensional cohomology of Kähler manifolds imposes very strong geometric constraints. This is true for “ordinary” cohomology on compact manifolds, and also for more exotic (i.e. ) cohomology on noncompact covers.

Kähler manifolds and groups, part 1

One of the nice things about living in Hyde Park is the proximity to the University of Chicago. Consequently, over the summer I came in to the department from time to time to work in my office, where I have all my math books, fast internet connection, etc. One day in early September (note: the Chicago quarter doesn’t start until October, so technically this was still “summer”) I happened to run in to Volodya Drinfeld in the hall, and he asked me what I knew about fundamental groups of (complex) projective varieties. I answered that I knew very little, but that what I did know (by hearsay) was that the most significant known restrictions on fundamental groups of projective varieties arise simply from the fact that such manifolds admit a Kähler structure, and that as far as anyone knows, the class of fundamental groups of projective varieties, and of Kähler manifolds, is the same.

Based on this brief interaction, Volodya asked me to give a talk on the subject in the Geometric Langlands seminar. On the face of it, this was a ridiculous request, in a department that contains Kevin Corlette and Madhav Nori, both of whom are world experts on the subject of fundamental groups of Kähler manifolds. But I agreed to the request, on the basis that I (at least!) would get a lot out of preparing for the talk, even if nobody else did.

Anyway, I ended up giving two talks for a total of about 5 hours in the seminar in successive weeks, and in the course of preparing for these talks I learned a lot about fundamental groups of Kähler manifolds. Most of the standard accounts of this material are aimed at people whose background is quite far from mine; so I thought it would be useful to describe, in a leisurely fashion, and in terms that I find more comfortable, some elements of this theory over the course of a few blog posts, starting with this one.

Liouville illiouminated

A couple of weeks ago, my student Yan Mary He presented a nice proof of Liouville’s theorem to me during our weekly meeting. The proof was the one from Benedetti-Petronio’s Lectures on Hyperbolic Geometry, which in my book gets lots of points for giving careful and complete details, and being self-contained and therefore accessible to beginning graduate students. Liouville’s Theorem is the fact that a conformal map between open subsets of Euclidean space of dimension at least 3 are Mobius transformations — i.e. they look locally like the restriction of a composition of Euclidean similarities and inversions on round spheres. This implies that the image of a piece of a plane or round sphere is a piece of a plane or round sphere, a highly rigid constraint. This sort of rigidity is in stark contrast to the case of conformal maps in dimension 2: any holomorphic (or antiholomorphic) map between open regions in the complex plane is a conformal map (and conversely). The proof given in Benedetti-Petronio is certainly clear and readable, and gives all the details; but Mary and I were a bit unsatisfied that it did not really provide any geometric insight into the meaning of the theorem. So the purpose of this blog post is to give a short sketch of a proof of Liouville’s theorem which is more geometric, and perhaps easier to remember.

Scharlemann on Schoenflies

Yesterday and today Marty Scharlemann gave two talks on the Schoenflies Conjecture, one of the great open problems in low dimensional topology. These talks were very clear and inspiring, and I thought it would be useful to summarize what Marty said in a blog post, just for my own benefit.

The story starts with the following classical theorem, usually called the Jordan curve theorem, or Jordan-Schoenflies theorem:

Theorem (Jordan-Schoenflies): Let P be a simple closed curve in the plane. Then its complement has a unique bounded component, whose closure is homeomorphic to the disk in such a way that P becomes the boundary of the disk.

In order to make the relationship between the two complementary components more symmetric, one could express this theorem by saying that a simple closed curve P in the 2-sphere separates the 2-sphere into two components X and Y, each of which has closure homeomorphic to a disk with P as the boundary.

Based on this simple but powerful fact in dimension 2, Schoenflies asked: is it true for every n that every n-sphere P in the (n+1)-sphere splits the (n+1)-sphere into two standard (n+1)-balls?

You can solve the cube – with commutators!

After a couple years of living out of suitcases, we recently sold our house in Pasadena, and bought a new one in Hyde Park. All our junk was shipped to us, and the boxes we didn’t feel like unpacking are all sitting around in the attic, where the kids have been spending a lot of time this summer. Every so often they root through some box and uncover some archaeological treasure; so it was that I found Lisa and Anna the other day, mucking around with a Rubik’s cube. They had persisted with it, and even managed to get the first layer done.

I remember seeing my first cube some time in early 1980; my Dad brought one home from work. He said I could have a play with it if I was careful not to scramble it (of course, I scrambled it). After a couple of hours of frustration trying to restore the initial state, I gave up and went to bed. In the morning the cube had been solved – I remember being pretty impressed with Dad for this (later he admitted that he had just taken the pieces out of their sockets). Within a year, Rubik’s cube fever had taken over – my Mum bought me a little book explaining how to solve the cube, and I memorized a small list of moves. I remember taking part in an “under 10” cube-solving competition; in the heat of the moment, I panicked and got stuck with only two layers done (since there were only two competitors, I came second anyway, and won a prize: a vinyl single of the Barron Knights performing “Mr. Rubik”). The solution in the book was a procedure for completing the cube layer by layer, by judiciously applying in order some sequence of operations, each of which had a precise effect on only a small number of cubelets, leaving the others untouched. In retrospect I find it a bit surprising – in view of how much effort I put into memorizing sequences, reproducing patterns (from the book), and trying to improve my speed – that I never had the curiosity to wonder how someone had come up with this list of “magic” operations in the first place. At the time it seemed a baffling mystery, and I wouldn’t have known where to get started to come up with such moves on my own. So the appearance of my kids playing with a cube 33 years later is the perfect opportunity for me to go back and work out a solution from first principles.

Chiral subsurface projection, asymmetric metrics and quasimorphisms

Last week I was at Oberwolfach for a meeting on geometric group theory. My friend and collaborator Koji Fujiwara gave a very nice talk about constructing actions of groups on quasi-trees (i.e. spaces quasi-isometric to trees). The construction is inspired by the famous subsurface projection construction, due to Masur-Minsky, which was a key step in their proof that the complex of curves (a natural simplicial complex on which the mapping class group acts cocompactly) is hyperbolic. Koji’s talk was very stimulating, and shook up my thinking about a few related matters; the purpose of this blog post is therefore for me to put some of my thoughts in order: to describe the Masur-Minsky construction, to point out a connection to certain geometric phenomena like winding numbers of curves on surfaces, and to note that a variation on their construction gives rise directly to certain natural chiral invariants of surface automorphisms (and their generalizations) which should be relevant to 4-manifold topologists.