Hilbert's Fifth Problem asks whether every topological group which is a manifold is in fact a (smooth!) Lie group; this was solved in the affirmative by Gleason and Montgomery-Zippin. A stronger conjecture is that a locally compact topological group which acts faithfully on a manifold must be a Lie group. This is the Hilbert--Smith Conjecture, which in full generality is still wide open. It is known, however (as a corollary to the work of Gleason and Montgomery-Zippin) that it suffices to rule out the case of the additive group of p-adic integers acting faithfully on a manifold. I will present a solution in dimension three.[-]

We are interested in the structure of the set of homomorphisms from a fixed (but arbitrary) finitely generated group G to the groups in some fixed family (such as the family of 3-manifold groups). I will explain what one might hope to say in different situations, and explain some applications to relatively hyperbolic groups and acylindrically hyperbolic groups, and some hoped-for applications to 3-manifold groups.
This is joint work with Michael Hull and joint work in preparation with Michael Hull and Hao Liang.[-]