The critical exponent: old and new.

The critical exponent is an important numerical invariant of discrete groups acting on negatively curved Hadamard manifolds, Gromov hyperbolic spaces, and higher-rank symmetric spaces. In this talk, I will focus on discrete groups acting on hyperbolic spaces (i.e., Kleinian groups), which is a family of important examples of these three types of spaces. In particular, I will review the classical result relating the critical exponent to the Hausdorff dimension using the Patterson-Sullivan theory and introduce new results about Kleinian groups with small or large critical exponents.