Counting and effective rigidity in algebra and geometry (Q1656357)

The authors study the spectrum of primitive geodesic lengths (resp., complex lengths) for arithmetic hyperbolic 2-manifolds (resp., 3-manifolds). Reid proved that this spectrum determines the commensurability class of the 2-manifold (resp., 3-manifold). They find out that for two incommensurable arithmetic manifolds of bounded volume, the length sets (resp., the complex length sets) must disagree for a length that can be explicitly bounded as a function of volume. They also prove an effective version of a similar rigidity result established by the second author with Reid property on a surface analog of the length spectrum for hyperbolic 3-manifolds. These effective results have corresponding algebraic analogues involving maximal subfields and quaternion subalgebras of quaternion algebras. To prove these effective rigidity results, they establish results on the asymptotic behavior of certain algebraic and geometric counting functions which are of independent interest.