recent progress on the poincare conjecture and the classification of 3 manifolds if m is a closed 3 manifold with trivial fundamental group then is m diffeomorphic to s the poincare conjecture is that the answer to this question is yes developing tools to attack this problem formed the basis for much of the work in 3 dimensional topology over the last century including for example the proof of dehn s lemma and the loop theorem and the study of surgery on knots and links in the 1980 s thurston developed another approach to 3 manifolds see 24 and 4 he considered 3 manifolds with riemannian metrics of constant negative curvature 1 these manifolds which are locally isometric to hyperbolic 3 space are called hyperbolic manifolds there are fairly obvious obstructions showing that not every 3 manifold can admit such a metric thurston formulated a general conjecture that roughly says that the obvious obstructions are the only ones should they vanish for a particular 3 manifold then that manifold admits such a metric his proof of various important special cases of this conjecture led him to formulate a more general conjecture about the existence of locally homogeneous metrics hyperbolic or otherwise for all manifolds this is called thurston s geometrization conjecture for 3 manifolds the statement of this conjecture is somewhat complicated so it is deferred until section 2 an important point is that thurston s geometrization conjecture includes the poincare conjecture as a very special case in addition thurston s conjecture has two advantages over the poincare conjecture it applies to all closed oriented 3 manifolds it posits a close relationship between topology and geometry in dimension three

existence of positive solutions for various boundary value problems in this paper we afford a concise approach to guarantee the existence of positive solutions for nonlinear second order ordinary differential equations with respect to various boundary conditions

positive solution for singular boundary value problems abstract a sufficient condition for the existence of positive solutions of the nonlinear boundary value problem u t f t u t 0 0 u 0 u 1 0 is constructed where f 0 1 0 0 is continuous f t u is locally lipschitz continuous and f t u u is strictly decreasing in u 0 for each t 0 1

the heat equation shrinking convex plane curves soient m et m des varietes de riemann et f m m une application reguliere si m est une courbe convexe plongee dans le plan r 2 l equation de la chaleur contracte m a un point

immersing almost geodesic surfaces in a closed hyperbolic three manifold let m 3 be a closed hyperbolic three manifold we construct closed surfaces that map by immersions into m 3 so that for each one the corresponding mapping on the universal covering spaces is an embedding or in other words the corresponding induced mapping on fundamental groups is an injection

hyperbolic structures on 3 manifolds i deformation of acylindrical manifolds this is the first in a series of papers showing that haken manifolds have hyperbolic structures this first was published the second two have existed only in preprint form and later preprints were never completed this eprint is only an approximation to the published version which is the definitive form for part i and is provided for convenience only all references and quotations should be taken from the published version since the theorem numbering is different and not all corrections have been incorporated into the present version parts ii and iii will be made available as eprints shortly

from dynamics on surfaces to rational points on curves has no integer solutions with x y z 1 inspiring generations of work in number theory its proof was finally achieved by wiles a qualitative result finite fermat was obtained earlier by faltings it says the fermat equation has only a finite number of solutions for each given n up to rescaling this paper is an appreciation of some of the topological intuitions behind number theory it aims to trace a logical path from the classification of surface diffeomorphisms to the proof of finite fermat the route we take is the following

zero estimates on group varieties ii the aim of this article is to give an account of a class of estimates that have in recent years been found useful in the theory of transcendental numbers as our space is limited and the estimates are quite technical in nature wc can provide no hints of proofs and we prefer to illustrate the results with examples rather than supply full statements we also mention some of the applications one basic method in transcendence theory can be described in general terms as follows suppose it is desired to establish a certain proposition usually it will be possible to associate with the problem a collection of meromorphic functions ft fnm such a way that assuming the falsity of the proposition imposes strong arithmetical conditions on the functions these enable us to construct a polynomial p p x1 xn such that the function f p f1 fn is not identically zero but has a large number of zeroes by means of analytic interpolation arguments it can then be deduced that takes many small values and by using once more the arithmetical conditions we conclude that has even more zeroes than initially arranged but often merely knowing upper bounds for the degree of p leads to upper bounds for the number of zeroes of and if we are lucky these yield the contradiction that proves the original proposition in this article we shall limit attention to the last stage of this argument as it is here that the most interesting recent progress has taken place a simple example will suffice to illustrate the sort of estimates involved to show that w and e cannot both be algebraic for w 0 suppose they are then we end up with a non zero polynomial p p x y of degree at most l 1 in x and of degree at most jf 1 in y such that the function

the colored jones polynomials and the simplicial volume of a knot we show that the set of colored jones polynomials and the set of generalized alexander polynomials defined by akutsu deguchi and ohtsuki intersect non trivially moreover it is shown that the intersection is at least includes the set of kashaev s quantum dilogarithm invariants for links therefore kashaev s conjecture can be restated as follows the colored jones polynomials determine the hyperbolic volume for a hyperbolic knot modifying this we propose a stronger conjecture the colored jones polynomials determine the simplicial volume for any knot if our conjecture is true then we can prove that a knot is trivial if and only if all of its vassiliev invariants are trivial in 13 r m kashaev defined a family of complex valued link invariants indexed by integers n 2 using the quantum dilogarithm later he calculated the asymptotic behavior of his invariant and observed that for the three simplest hyperbolic knots it grows as exp vol k n 2 when n goes to the infinity where vol k is the hyperbolic volume of the complement of a knotk 14 this amazing result and his conjecture that the same also holds for any hyperbolic knot have been almost ignored by mathematicians since his definition of the invariant is too complicated though it uses only elementary tools the aim of this paper is to reveal his mysterious definition and to show that his invariant is nothing but a specialization of the colored jones polynomial the colored jones polynomial is defined for colored links each component is decorated with an irreducible representation of the lie algebra sl 2 c the original jones polynomial corresponds to the case that all the colors are identical to the 2 dimensional fundamental representation we show that kashaev s invariant with parameter n coincides with the colored jones polynomial in a certain normalization with every color the n dimensional representation evaluated at the primitive n th root of unity we have to normalize the colored jones polynomial so that the value for the trivial knot is one for otherwise it always vanishes on the other hand there are other colored polynomial invariants the generalized multivariable alexander polynomial defined by y akutsu t deguchi and t ohtsuki 1 they used the same lie algebra sl 2 c but a different hierarchy of representations their invariants are parameterized by c 1 parameters an integer date february 1 2008 1991 mathematics subject classification 57m25 57m50 17b37 81r50

an application of topological transversality to non positive higher order difference equations in this paper we shall provide sufficient conditions on the non positive function i u 1 u n 1 so that the boundary value problem bvp given by e d nu i m i u i du i d n 2 i 0 and bc d mu 0 0 0 m n 3 a d n 2 0 b d n 1u 0 0 c d n 2u t 1 d d n 1u t 1 0 has at least one positive solution

from rational billiards to dynamics on moduli spaces this short expository note gives an elementary introduction to the study of dynamics on certain moduli spaces and in particular the recent breakthrough result of eskin mirzakhani and mohammadi we also discuss the context and applications of this result and connections to other areas of mathematics such as algebraic geometry teichmuller theory and ergodic theory on

a proof of thurston s topological characterization of rational functions the criterion proved in this paper was stated by thurston in november 1982 thurston lectured on its proof on several occasions notably at the nsf summer conference in duluth 1983 where one of the authors jhh was present using the notes of various attendants at these lectures we have reconstructed a proof that we have made as precise as we could since this required a certain amount of work on our part we thought it might be of some use to present this proof to the reader we thank dennis sullivan for useful conversations and fritz yon haesseler and especially ben wittner for help with the writing and valuable suggestions after the first version was written clifford earle pointed out that better estimates than what we had were to be found in b

three dimensional manifolds kleinian groups and hyperbolic geometry 1 a conjectural picture of 3 manifolds a major thrust of mathematics in the late 19th century in which poincare had a large role was the uniformization theory for riemann surfaces that every conformai structure on a closed oriented surface is represented by a riemannian metric of constant curvature for the typical case of negative euler characteristic genus greater than 1 such a metric gives a hyperbolic structure any small neighborhood in the surface is isometric to a neighborhood in the hyperbolic plane and the surface itself is the quotient of the hyperbolic plane by a discrete group of motions the exceptional cases the sphere and the torus have spherical and euclidean structures three manifolds are greatly more complicated than surfaces and i think it is fair to say that until recently there was little reason to expect any analogous theory for manifolds of dimension 3 or more except perhaps for the fact that so many 3 manifolds are beautiful the situation has changed so that i feel fairly confident in proposing the

riemann surfaces and the geometrization of 3 manifolds about a decade ago thurston proved that a vast collection of 3 manifolds carry metrics of constant negative curvature these manifolds are thus elements of hyperbolic geometry as natural as euclid s regular polyhedra for a closed manifold mostow rigidity assures that a hyperbolic structure is unique when it exists mos so topology and geometry mesh harmoniously in dimension 3 this remarkable theorem applies to all 3 manifolds which can be built up in an inductive way from 3 balls i e haken manifolds thurston s construction of a hyperbolic structure is also inductive at the inductive step one must find the right geometry on an open 3 manifold so that its ends may be glued together using quasiconformal deformations the gluing problem can be formulated as a fixed point problem for a map of teichmuller space to itself thurston proposes to find the fixed point by iterating this map here we outline thurston s construction and sketch a new proof that the iteration converges our argument rests on a result entirely in the theory of riemann surfaces an extremal quasiconformal mapping can be relaxed isotoped to a map of lesser dilatation when lifted to a sufficiently

the heat equation shrinks embedded plane curves to round points soit c 0 s 1 r 2 une courbe lisse plongee dans le plan alors c s 1 0 t r 2 existe en satisfaisant c t k n ou k est la courbure de c et n est son vecteur unite normal entrant c t est lisse pour tout t il converge vers un point quand t t et sa forme limite quand t t est un cercle rond avec convergence dans norme c

nonlinear boundary value problems in hilbert spaces abstract in this paper we examine nonlinear two point boundary value problems with sturm liouville type boundary conditions in a hilbert space our technique involves using the topological transversality theorem of a granas which relies on the notions of an essential map and a priori bounds on solutions we obtain existence results for a wide class of problems with our nonlinear term satisfying a bernstein nagumo growth condition

second and higher order systems of boundary value problems abstract existence results for systems of kth order boundary value problems are presented our analysis is based on a nonlinear alternative of a granas and use of a priori bounds