Deformation theory and finite simple quotients of triangle groups I
Let with and let be the corresponding hyperbolic triangle group. Many papers have been dedicated to the following question: what are the finite (simple) groups which appear as quotients of ? (Classically, for and more recently also for general .) These papers have used either explicit constructive methods or probabilistic ones. The goal of this paper is to present a new approach based on the theory of representation varieties (via deformation theory). As a corollary we essentially prove...