Spaces which are not negatively curved (Q1128153)

Thurston's hyperbolization conjecture says that a closed aspherical \(3\)-manifold must be hyperbolic if it contains no immersed incompressible torus. The paper under review treats the analog of this conjecture for \(2\)-complexes, namely, the following theorem is proved. Theorem. Let \(X\) be a finite simplicial \(2\)-complex with a piecewise Euclidean metric. Then either \(X\) is negatively curved or else there is a compact, \(2\)-dimensional measured lamination \(\Lambda\) of Euler characteristic zero and a ``nice'' map of \(\Lambda\) into \(X\) which is strongly least area on leaves. Here ``negatively curved'' means that the universal cover of \(X\) is \(\delta\)-hyperbolic for some \(\delta\geq 0\), that is, the \(\delta\)-neighborhood of any two sides of any geodesic triangle in the universal cover of \(X\) contains the third side. One of the reasons for considering only \(2\)-dimensional complexes is to simplify lamination theory.