We answer Hubbard's question on determining the Thurston equivalence class of “twisted rabbits”, i.e. composita of the “rabbit” polynomial with nth powers of the Dehn twists about its ears. The answer is expressed in terms of the 4-adic expansion of n. We also answer the equivalent question for the other two families of degree-2 topological polynomials with three post-critical points. In the process, we rephrase the questions in group-theoretical language, in terms of wreath recursions.

In this paper, we investigate the topology of a class of non-Kähler compact complex manifolds generalizing that of Hopf and Calabi-Eckmann manifolds. These manifolds are diffeomorphic to special systems of real quadrics Cⁿ which are invariant with respect to the natural action of the real torus (S¹)ⁿ onto Cⁿ. The quotient space is a simple convex polytope. The problem reduces thus to the study of the topology of certain real algebraic sets and can be handled using combinatorial results on convex polytopes. We prove that the homology groups of these compact complex manifolds can have arbitrary amount of torsion so that their topology is extremely rich. We also resolve an associated wall-crossing problem by introducing holomorphic equivariant elementary surgeries related to some transformations of the simple convex polytope. Finally, as a nice consequence, we obtain that affine non-Kähler compact complex manifolds can have arbitrary amount of torsion in their homology groups, contrasting with the Kähler situation.

We show that closed, locally symmetric spaces of non-compact type have positive simplicial volume. This gives a positive answer to a question that was first raised by (Gromov in Inst Hautes Études Sci Publ Math 56:5, 1982).