Milnor's Problem on the Growth of Groups and its Consequences

Abstract: We present a survey of results related to the Milnor's problem on group growth. We discuss the cases of polynomial growth, exponential but not uniformly exponential growth, but the main part of the article is devoted to the intermediate (between polynomial and exponential) growth case. A number of related topics (growth of manifolds, amenability, asymptotic behavior of random walks) is considered, and a number of open problems is suggested.