Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

We will discuss how to put a hyperbolic structure on various surface and 3-manifolds. We will being by discussing isometries of hyperbolic space in dimension 2 and 3. Using our understanding of these isometries we will explicitly construct hyperbolic structures on all close surfaces of genus greater than one and a complete finite volume hyperbolic structure on the punctured torus. We will then consider the three dimensional case where we will concentrate on putting hyperbolic structures on knot complements. (Note: this is a 1.5 hr lecture)