Manifold geometries (Q1373287)

The paper is based on the inaugural lecture of the author in 1996 at the ETH Zürich. It contains a brief description of Thurston's classification programme for closed 3-manifolds including a report on the present state of the proof of Thurston's conjecture which says that any closed prime 3-manifold is isomorphic to one of eight known homogeneous examples. For more information the reader is referred to \textit{W. R. Thurston}'s recent book ``Three-dimensional geometry and topology'' (1997; Zbl 0873.57001). For those who are not familiar with this subject the paper under review may serve as a quick and easy introduction which is a pleasure to read.