This text describes the living, evolving cultural experience of Latin America. The authors place key elements to understanding both the region's history and its present, people, places, politics, economics, and cultures, into historical perspective.

For the past 25 years, the Geometrization Program of Thurston has been a driving force for research in 3-manifold topology. This has inspired a surge of activity investigating hyperbolic 3-manifolds (and Kleinian groups), as these manifolds form the largest and least well-understood class of compact 3-manifolds. Familiar and new tools from diverse areas of mathematics have been utilized in these investigations, from topology, geometry, analysis, group theory, and from the point of view of this book, algebra and number theory. This book is aimed at readers already familiar with the basics of...