Thurston’s Broken Windows Only Theorem Revisited

The “broken windows only theorem” is the main theorem of the third paper among a series of papers in which Thurston proved his uniformisation theorem for Haken manifolds. In this chapter, we show that the second statement of this theorem is not valid, giving a counter-example. We also give a weaker version of this statement with a proof. In the last section, we speculate on how this second statement was intended to be used in the proof of the bounded image theorem, which constituted a key of the uniformisation theorem. The proof of the bounded image theorem was obtained only quite recently, although a weaker version, which is sufficient for the proof of the uniformisation theorem, had already been proved.