This volume is based on lectures given at the highly successful three-week Summer School on Geometry, Topology and Dynamics of Character Varieties held at the National University of Singapore's Institute for Mathematical Sciences in July 2010.Aimed at graduate students in the early stages of research, the edited and refereed articles comprise an excellent introduction to the subject of the program, much of which is otherwise available only in specialized texts. Topics include hyperbolic structures on surfaces and their degenerations, applications of ping-pong lemmas in various contexts, introductions to Lorenzian and complex hyperbolic geometry, and representation varieties of surface groups into PSL(2, ) and other semi-simple Lie groups. This volume will serve as a useful portal to students and researchers in a vibrant and multi-faceted area of mathematics.

The subject of Kleinian groups and hyperbolic 3-manifolds is currently undergoing explosively fast development, the last few years having seen the resolution of many longstanding conjectures. This volume contains important expositions and original work by some of the main contributors on topics such as topology and geometry of 3-manifolds, curve complexes, classical Ahlfors-Bers theory, computer explorations and projective structures. Researchers in these and related areas will find much of interest here from the explosion in the area over recent years, including important and original research from leading names in the field.

Felix Klein, a great geometer of the nineteenth century, rediscovered an idea from Hindu mythology in mathematics: the heaven of Indra in which the whole Universe was mirrored in each pearl in a net of pearls. Practically impossible to represent by hand, this idea barely existed outside the imagination, until the 1980s when the authors embarked on the first computer investigation of Klein's vision. In this extraordinary book they explore the path from some basic mathematical ideas to the simple algorithms that create delicate fractal filigrees, most appearing in print for the first time. Step-by-step instructions for writing computer programs allow beginners to generate the images.