Questions tagged [hyperbolic-geometry]

The tag has no usage guidance.

Filter by
Sorted by
Tagged with
56 votes
6 answers
5k views

What do Weierstrass points look like?

As somebody who mostly works with smooth, real manifolds, I've always been a little uncomfortable with Weierstrass points. Smooth manifolds are totally homogeneous, but in the complex category you ...
Matt Noonan's user avatar
  • 3,984
49 votes
14 answers
6k views

Interactive model of the hyperbolic plane for a general public lecture

The following is not quite a research level question, but I still find this site appropriate for asking it. I hope I get it right here. I am preparing a talk for a general public and I want to ...
Uri Bader's user avatar
  • 11.4k
48 votes
3 answers
7k views

Thurston's 24 questions: All settled?

Thurston's 1982 article on three-dimensional manifolds1 ends with $24$ "open questions":       $\cdots$ Two naive questions from an outsider: (1) Have all $24$ now been resolved? (2)...
Joseph O'Rourke's user avatar
40 votes
1 answer
1k views

Four circles on the sphere

Consider generic configurations consisting of 4 distinct circles on the sphere. Two configurations are equivalent if they can be mapped onto each other by a homeomorphism of the sphere. How to ...
Alexandre Eremenko's user avatar
35 votes
17 answers
2k views

Equivalent definitions of Gromov hyperbolicity

Let $X$ be a metric space. I'd like to collect as many definitions of Gromov hyperbolicity or $\delta$-hyperbolicity of $X$ as possible. I'm happy for the definitions to require some niceness ...
33 votes
3 answers
2k views

chromatic number of the hyperbolic plane

A notorious problem in combinatorics is the following: If we color $\mathbb{R}^2$ so that no pair of points at unit distance get the same color, what is the fewest number of colors required? This ...
Matthew Kahle's user avatar
31 votes
4 answers
2k views

Why do people study representations of 3-manifold groups into $SL(n,\mathbb{C})$?

Varieties of representations and characters of $3$-manifold groups in $SL(2,\mathbb{C})$ have been intensively studied. They have provided tools to identify geometric structures on manifolds, and are ...
Daniel Moskovich's user avatar
30 votes
7 answers
5k views

Why are Fuchsian groups interesting?

I keep hearing that fuchsian groups are interesting for other reasons than the Fuchsian model for hyperbolic Riemann surfaces. What are those reasons? Are the Fuchsian groups with fixed points ...
JS.'s user avatar
  • 893
29 votes
3 answers
2k views

Intuition for Zagier's theorem for $\zeta_K(2)$

In 1986, Don Zagier generalized Euler's theorem ($\zeta_\mathbb{Q}(2)=\pi ^2 /6$) to an arbitrary number field $K$: $$\zeta_K(2)=\frac{\pi^{2r+2s}}{\sqrt{|D|}}\times \sum_v c_v A(x_{v,1})...A(x_{v,s})...
Myshkin's user avatar
  • 17.4k
26 votes
7 answers
2k views

Tetrahedra with prescribed face angles

I am looking for an analogue for the following 2 dimensional fact: Given 3 angles $\alpha,\beta,\gamma\in (0;\pi)$ there is always a triangle with these prescribed angles. It is spherical/euclidean/...
HenrikRüping's user avatar
26 votes
4 answers
1k views

Equations defining hyperbolic geodesics in $\mathbb C \setminus\{0,1\}$

Let $X=\mathbb C\setminus\{0,1\}$, equipped with the hyperbolic structure it inherits from Klein's modular $\lambda$ function $\lambda:\mathbb H \to X$. In each (non-peripheral and nontrivial) free-...
Jonah Gaster's user avatar
26 votes
2 answers
672 views

Hyperbolic exceptional fillings of cusped hyperbolic 3-manifolds

Thurston's Hyperbolic Dehn Surgery Theorem says that all but finitely many fillings of a cusp of a hyperbolic 3-manifold result in hyperbolic manifolds that are deformations of the original manifold. ...
Ken Baker's user avatar
  • 743
26 votes
2 answers
2k views

Harmonic spinors on closed hyperbolic manifolds

Does anyone know an example of a closed spin hyperbolic manifold of dimension 3 or greater such that the kernel of the Dirac operator is non-trivial? I'm mainly interested in the 3-dimensional case ...
Danny Ruberman's user avatar
26 votes
2 answers
2k views

Examples of Einstein four-manifolds of negative sectional curvature

Are there any nontrivial compact Einstein four-manifolds of negative or nonpositive sectional curvature? by nontrivial we mean not quotients of $\mathbb{H}^4$, $\mathbb{C}H^2$, $\mathbb{H}^2\times\...
littlelittlelittle's user avatar
25 votes
1 answer
732 views

Alternate proofs that hyperbolic plane can’t be isometrically immersed in $\mathbb{R}^3$

A famous theorem of Hilbert says that there is no smooth immersion of the hyperbolic plane in 3-dimensional Euclidean space. The expositions of this that I know of (in eg do Carmo’s book on curves/...
Linda's user avatar
  • 251
24 votes
4 answers
1k views

Immersions of the hyperbolic plane

Is it possible to isometrically immerse the hyperbolic plane into a compact Riemannian manifold as a totally geodesic submanifold? Any nice examples? Edit: Although I did not originally say so, I was ...
alvarezpaiva's user avatar
  • 13.2k
24 votes
2 answers
1k views

SnapPea for the uninitiated

SnapPea (http://www.math.uic.edu/~t3m/SnapPy/) is a program with extensive facilities for doing various kinds of calculations with hyperbolic 3-manifolds. The official documentation assumes that the ...
Neil Strickland's user avatar
24 votes
3 answers
1k views

Hyperbolic Coxeter polytopes and Del-Pezzo surfaces

Added. In the following link there is a proof of the observation made in this question: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5546138/DelpezzoCoxeter.pdf I would like to find a reference for a beautiful ...
Dmitri Panov's user avatar
  • 28.8k
22 votes
2 answers
2k views

Is every elementary absolute geometry Euclidean or hyperbolic?

Absolute geometry is any one that satisfies Hilbert's axioms of plane geometry without the axiom of parallels. It is well-known that it is either the Euclidean or a hyperbolic plane. For an elementary ...
Conifold's user avatar
  • 1,599
22 votes
2 answers
2k views

Non-residually finite matrix groups

By Malcev's theorem, every finitely generated linear group is residually finite (RF). On the other hand, say, the group of rational numbers is linear, but is not residually finite. Thus, one has to ...
Misha's user avatar
  • 31k
20 votes
2 answers
2k views

Smallest tile to tessellate the hyperbolic plane

Is it known what the smallest tile (in terms of area) that can tessellate the hyperbolic plane is? In particular, it should tessellate the plane by itself. I think it will be a Triangle group, but I'...
Christopher King's user avatar
20 votes
4 answers
2k views

Is there a volume conjecture for closed 3-manifolds?

A typical statement of the volume conjecture, for instance in Murakami's survey 1002.0126, is Conjecture: For $K$ a knot in $S^3$, the N-th colored Jones polynomials are related to the volume of ...
cdouglas's user avatar
  • 3,083
20 votes
3 answers
1k views

Failure of Mostow rigidity in dimension 2

I am trying to understand why Mostow rigidity fails in dimension 2. More concretely, I have the following question: (1) What is an example of a quasiisometry $f$ of the hyperbolic plane $\mathbb H^2$ ...
Jens Reinhold's user avatar
20 votes
1 answer
1k views

Why is there a unique hyperbolic simplex of largest area?

Why is there a unqiue ideal $n$-simplex in $\mathbb H^n$ with largest volume for $n\geq 3$? For $n=3$, this is a standard calculation, and for larger dimensions is much harder (see Haagerup and ...
John Pardon's user avatar
  • 18.3k
20 votes
1 answer
655 views

Complexifications of hyperbolic manifolds

I'm wondering when a compact hyperbolic $n$-manifold ($n \geq 3$) can embed in a complex hyperbolic $n$-manifold as a real algebraic subvariety so that it is a component of the fixed point set of ...
Ian Agol's user avatar
  • 66.8k
20 votes
1 answer
984 views

Canonical immersion of the double torus

It is easy to check that the immersion $\mathbb{T}^2=\mathbb{S}^1\times \mathbb{S}^1\longrightarrow\mathbb{R}^4$, $(\alpha,\beta)\longmapsto(\cos\alpha,\sin\alpha,\cos\beta,\sin\beta)$ induces the ...
Jjm's user avatar
  • 2,071
18 votes
3 answers
1k views

How to see isometries of figure 8 knot complement

The figure 8 knot complement $M$ is the orientable double cover of the Gieseking manifold, which implies that $M$ has a fixed-point free involution. If we think of $M$ with its hyperbolic metric, this ...
Michael Siler's user avatar
18 votes
2 answers
4k views

Reference request: Geodesic flow on a manifold with negative curvature is ergodic

I'm reading about the Mostow's rigidity theorem, and the proof uses the following (maybe well-known) result: The geodesic flow on a manifold with negative curvature is ergodic. The lecture note that ...
Boyu Zhang's user avatar
18 votes
3 answers
1k views

The number of cusps of higher-dimensional hyperbolic manifolds

Suppose $n$ is an integer greater than 3. Sometimes ago I heard somewhere that it is still not known if there exist complete finite-volume hyperbolic $n$-manifolds having exactly one cusp. Could ...
Roberto Frigerio's user avatar
18 votes
2 answers
1k views

Hyperbolic Volume and Chern-Simons

In the paper ``Analytic Continuation Of Chern-Simons Theory'' (arXiv:1001.2933) Witten postulates that hyperbolic volume of 3-dimensional manifold coincides with the value of the Chern-Simons ...
d1-d5's user avatar
  • 183
18 votes
1 answer
1k views

The Teichmüller space $T_g$ of a closed riemann surface $S_g$ of genus $g \geq 2$ can't be parametrized by $6g−6$ geodesic length functions

I asked this question almost a month ago on Math SE. After waiting three weeks for an answer or a comment, I opened a bounty on the question in hope that it might get an answer this way. The bounty ...
user331406's user avatar
18 votes
2 answers
2k views

How does hyperbolicity of space time affect our lives?

My main research has been in hyperbolic geometry and geometric group theory. I always thought that the only real "application" of my work was that the universe is a 3-manifold. But recently I found ...
Brian Rushton's user avatar
18 votes
1 answer
812 views

What sort of models did Bolyai and Lobachevsky use to demonstrate the consistency of their models of non-Euclidean Geometry?

As is well-known, in the 1820s both Bolyai and Lobachevsky showed, at long last, the independence of the Parallel Postulate from the rest of the axioms of Euclidean geometry by developing what we now ...
Dick Palais's user avatar
  • 15.2k
18 votes
2 answers
3k views

A question about the proof of Mostow rigidity

I have recently been studying a proof of Mostow rigidity (along the lines of Mostow's original argument), and I'm left a little confused about something. We start with an isomorphism $\alpha: \Gamma \...
Paul Siegel's user avatar
  • 28.8k
18 votes
1 answer
877 views

Locus of equal area hyperbolic triangles

Henry Segerman and I recently considered the following question: Given a fixed area $A < \pi$ and two fixed points in the upper half-plane model for hyperbolic $2$-space, what is the locus of ...
Grant Lakeland's user avatar
17 votes
5 answers
4k views

〈x,y : x^p = y^p = (xy)^p = 1〉

Let $p$ be an odd prime and $G := \langle x,y : x^p = y^p = (xy)^p = 1 \rangle$. I want to show that $G$ is infinite and wonder if there is a good way to prove this. I'm familiar with the basics of ...
Martin Brandenburg's user avatar
17 votes
3 answers
2k views

Examples of the Thurston geometries with transitive Lie group action

Here are some examples of compact homogeneous 3 manifolds for different Thurston geometries: (1) Spherical: $\mathbb{S}^3 \cong \mathrm{SU}_2$ modulo any finite subgroup (2) Euclidean: 3 torus $\...
Ian Gershon Teixeira's user avatar
17 votes
2 answers
2k views

Geodesics on the twisted pseudosphere (Dini's surface)

I wonder how difficult it is to compute geodesics on Dini's Surface, a twisted pseudosphere? Here is one parametrization, from Alfred Gray's Modern Differential Geometry of Curves and Surfaces, p....
Joseph O'Rourke's user avatar
17 votes
2 answers
916 views

Why are the medians of a triangle concurrent? In absolute geometry

This fact holds true in absolute geometry, and I would like to see an elementary synthetic proof not using the classification of absolute planes (Euclidean and hyperbolic planes) and specific models. ...
Fedor Petrov's user avatar
17 votes
4 answers
3k views

Finding Constant Curvature Metrics on Surfaces without full power of Uniformization

(I rewrote this question, hopefully it's more clear now. It's still the same question, but I reordered its parts.) Let S be a surface (possibly non-compact, but no boundary). It seems that there are ...
Ilya Grigoriev's user avatar
17 votes
1 answer
982 views

Hyperbolic manifolds which fiber over the circle

If $N^2$ is a closed, orientable surface of genus at least $2$, and if $\phi$ is an (orientation-preserving) pseudo-Anosov mapping on $N$, then one can form the closed orientable 3-manifold $M^3$ by ...
Steve D's user avatar
  • 4,335
17 votes
0 answers
580 views

Actions on ℍⁿ generated by torsion elements

Let $n$ be a large integer. I am looking for a cocompact properly discontinuous isometric action on $n$-dimensional Lobachevky space which is generated by elements of finite order. Or equivalently, ...
Anton Petrunin's user avatar
16 votes
5 answers
4k views

can you fool SnapPea?

A while back I thought I had some simple knots that "fooled" SnapPea. But I no longer remember those examples, if I ever had them to begin with. What I'm looking for is a non-hyperbolizable knot ...
Ryan Budney's user avatar
  • 42.8k
16 votes
4 answers
1k views

Abel's equation for the dilog

Abel's identity for the dilogarithm (see the wikipedia page about polylogarithms) plays a role in web geometry as it is one of the abelian relations of the first example of exceptional web (Bol's 5-...
Jorge Vitório Pereira's user avatar
16 votes
2 answers
3k views

The fundamental group of a closed surface without classification of surfaces?

The fundamental group of a closed oriented surface of genus $g$ has the well-known presentation $$ \langle x_1,\ldots, x_g,y_1,\ldots ,y_g\vert \prod_{i=1}^{g} [x_i,y_i]\rangle. $$ The proof I know ...
Johannes Ebert's user avatar
16 votes
1 answer
1k views

Borel-Serre compactification of $\mathbb{H}^3 / SL_2(\mathcal{O}_K)$

Let $\mathbb{H}^3$ be the three-dimensional hyperbolic space. Let $K$ be an imaginary quadratic number field and $\mathcal{O}_K$ its ring of integers. Then $SL_2(\mathcal{O}_K)$ acts on $\mathbb{H}^3$ ...
hyp93's user avatar
  • 163
16 votes
2 answers
1k views

Maximum of a function of one variable

Let $D$ be a circular quadrilateral (that is a Jordan region whose boundary consists of 4 arcs of circles all orthogonal to the unit circle) whose interior angles are all equal to 0, the vertices lie ...
Alexandre Eremenko's user avatar
15 votes
2 answers
2k views

Dehn's algorithm for word problem for surface groups

For some $g \geq 2$, let $\Gamma_g$ be the fundamental group of a closed genus $g$ surface and let $S_g=\{a_1,b_1,\ldots,a_g,b_g\}$ be the usual generating set for $\Gamma_g$ satisfying the surface ...
John M's user avatar
  • 153
15 votes
1 answer
1k views

How can I calculate the period matrix of this Riemann surface?

I am attempting to calculate the period matrix of the Riemann surface associated to the zero set of a complex curve: $y^3 = x^4 -1$. Background: It is my understanding that the period matrix of a ...
Catherine Ray's user avatar
15 votes
1 answer
351 views

Are hyperbolic $n$-manifolds recursively enumerable?

Fixing a dimension $n \ge 4$, is the class of closed hyperbolic $n$-manifolds recursively enumerable? Since hyperbolic manifolds are triangulable I can reformulate this in the following more explicit ...
Jean Raimbault's user avatar

1
2 3 4 5
18