Counting commensurability classes of hyperbolic manifolds

Abstract

Gromov and Piatetski-Shapiro proved existence of finite volume non-arithmetic hyperbolic manifolds of any given dimension. In dimension four and higher, we show that there are about v^v such manifolds of volume at most v, considered up to commensurability. Since the number of arithmetic ones tends to be polynomial, almost all hyperbolic manifolds are non-arithmetic in an appropriate sense. Our method involves a geometric graph-of-spaces construction that relies on arithmetic properties of certain quadratic forms.