Groups acting on hyperbolic spaces -- a survey (Q6118165)

In the survey under review, the author gives the reader a taste of the developments in geometric group theory in the last 35 years, focusing on groups acting on Gromov hyperbolic spaces. The main examples of such groups are mapping class groups of compact surfaces and the outer automorphism groups of free groups of finite rank. After a brief historical introduction (Section 1), the paper deals with hyperbolic groups themselves (Section 2), giving definitions and related main results: \begin{itemize} \item Section 2.2 concerns with the action of a hyperbolic group on the Rips complex; \item Sections 2.4 and 2.5 respectively introduce the concepts of boundary and asymptotic dimension; \item in Sections 2.6 and 2.7, the JSJ-decompositions and the combination theorem are dealt with; \item Sections 2.9--2.12 focus on \(\mathbb R\)-trees; in particular, the Rips machine is presented in Section 2.11; \end{itemize} Mapping class groups are discussed in Section 3, while projection complexes are discussed in Section 4. The final Section 5 deals with outer automorphism groups of a free group of finite rank: it should be noted that Section 5.6 contains many open questions on the topic. For the entire collection see [Zbl 07816356].