The Geometrization Conjecture

John Morgan author Gang Tian author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:American Mathematical Society

Published:30th May '14

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

The Geometrization Conjecture cover

This book gives a complete proof of the geometrization conjecture, which describes all compact 3-manifolds in terms of geometric pieces, i.e., 3-manifolds with locally homogeneous metrics of finite volume. The method is to understand the limits as time goes to infinity of Ricci flow with surgery. The first half of the book is devoted to showing that these limits divide naturally along incompressible tori into pieces on which the metric is converging smoothly to hyperbolic metrics and pieces that are locally more and more volume collapsed. The second half of the book is devoted to showing that the latter pieces are themselves geometric. This is established by showing that the Gromov-Hausdorff limits of sequences of more and more locally volume collapsed 3-manifolds are Alexandrov spaces of dimension at most 2 and then classifying these Alexandrov spaces. In the course of proving the geometrization conjecture, the authors provide an overview of the main results about Ricci flows with surgery on 3-dimensional manifolds, introducing the reader to this difficult material. The book also includes an elementary introduction to Gromov-Hausdorff limits and to the basics of the theory of Alexandrov spaces. In addition, a complete picture of the local structure of Alexandrov surfaces is developed. All of these important topics are of independent interest.

In the introduction the authors give a good outline of the proof so the reader can catch the spirit of such a complex proof. In the course of proving the conjecture, the authors apply very difficult tools reviewed in the book. They give a good survey on Ricci flows with surgery on 3-dimensional manifolds and they discuss in details the properties of the Hausdorff–Gromov distance and the theory of Alexandrov spaces." - János Kincses, Acta Sci. Math.

ISBN: 9780821852019

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: 692g

291 pages