Some footnotes on Thurston's Notes ''The Geometry and Topology of 3-manifolds''

Abstract

These are a few historical remarks, addenda and references with comments on some topics discussed by Thurston in his notes ''The geometry and topology of three-manifolds''. The topics are mainly hyperbolic geometry, geometric structures, volumes of hyperbolic polyhedra and the so-called Koebe--Andreev--Thurston theorem. I discuss in particular some works of Lobachevsky, Andreev and Milnor, with an excursus in Dante's cosmology, based on the insight of Pavel Florensky. The final version of this paper will appear as a chapter in the book ''In the tradition of Thurston. III'', ed. K. Ohshika and A. Papadopoulos, Springer Nature Switzerland, 2024.