Peter Scott’s famous result states that the fundamental groups of hyperbolic surfaces are subgroup separable, which has many powerful consequences. For example, given any closed curve on such a surface, potentially with many self-intersections, there is always a finite cover to which the curve lifts to an embedding. It was shown recently that hyperbolic 3-manifold groups share this separability property, and this was a key tool in Ian Agol's resolution to the Virtual Haken and Virtual Fibering conjectures for hyperbolic 3-manifolds.

I will begin this talk by giving some background on separability properties of groups, hyperbolic manifolds, and these two conjectures. There are also a number of interesting quantitative questions that naturally arise in the context of these topics. These questions fit into a recent trend in low-dimensional topology aimed at providing concrete topological and geometric information about hyperbolic manifolds that often cannot be gathered from existence results alone. I will highlight a few of them before focusing on a quantitative question regarding the process of lifting curves on surfaces to embeddings in finite covers.