This book develops some of the extraordinary richness, beauty, and power of geometry in two and three dimensions, and the strong connection of geometry with topology. Hyperbolic geometry is the star. A strong effort has been made to convey not just denatured formal reasoning (definitions, theorems, and proofs), but a living feeling for the subject. There are many figures, examples, and exercises of varying difficulty.

This book was the origin of a grand scheme developed by Thurston that is now coming to fruition. In the 1920s and 1930s the mathematics of two-dimensional spaces...