2/21/2008

Peter Storm
University of Pennsylvania

Deformation of a hyperbolic 4-orbifold

It is well known that Thurston's beautiful deformation theory of hyperbolic structures is mostly useless in dimensions > 3. Steve Kerckhoff and I have been studying a new example of a hyperbolic deformation in 4 dimensions which produces an infinite number of new hyperbolic 4-orbifolds with interesting properties. The talk will attempt to motivate this work. It will be aimed at a general geometry/topology audience.