WE CONSIDER Haken manifolds M. That is three manifolds which are compact, irreducible, orientable, and sufficiently 1arge. S 8M may or may not be empty. This class of 3-manifolds shares many properties with closed surfaces (# S2 or RP2). On an algebraic level, both are examples of K (T, 1)s. More geometrically the hierarchy structure of a Haken manifold [9] is analogous to a sequence of cuts turning a surface into a disk. With the aid of minimal surfaces we are able to find a sufficiently natural hierarchy to establish a new similarity between Haken manifolds and surfaces. Our main theorem is:

In this paper the authors study the hyperbolic geometric flow on Riemann surfaces. This new nonlinear geometric evolution equation was recently introduced by the first two authors, motivated by Einstein equation and Hamilton's Ricci flow. We prove that, for any given initial metric on ² in certain class of metrics, one can always choose suitable initial velocity symmetric tensor such that the solution exists for all time, and the scalar curvature corresponding to the solution metric <i>g</i> _<i>ij</i> keeps uniformly bounded for all time; moreover, if the initial velocity tensor is suitably large", then the solution metric <i>g</i> _<i>ij</i> converges to the flat metric at an algebraic rate. If the initial velocity tensor does not satisfy the condition, then the solution blows up at a finite time, and the scalar curvature <i>R</i>(<i>t</i>, <i>x</i>) goes to positive infinity as (<i>t</i>, <i>x</i>) tends to the blowup points, and a flow with surgery has

Given a complex analytic function f on a Whitney stratified complex analytic variety of complex dimension n, whose real part Re (f) is Morse, we prove the existence of a stratified gradient-like vector field for Re (f) such that the unstable set of a critical point p on a stratum S of complex dimension s has real dimension m (p)+ ns as was conjectured by Goresky and MacPherson.

We propose a finite-dimensional variational principle on triangulated 3-manifolds so that its critical points are related to solutions to Thurstons gluing equation and Hakens normal surface equation. The action functional is the volume.

In this paper, we produce an elementary approach to Thurston's theory of measured laminations on compact surfaces with non-empty boundary. We show that the theory can be derived from a simple inequality for geometric intersection numbers between arcs inside an octagon.