The geometry of non-arithmetic hyperbolic manifolds is mysterious in spite of how plentiful they are. McMullen and Reid independently conjectured that such manifolds have only finitely many totally geodesic hyperplanes and their conjecture was recently settled by Bader-Fisher-Miller-Stover in dimensions larger than 3. Their works rely on superrigidity theorems and are not constructive.

In this talk, we strengthen their result by proving a quantitative finiteness theorem for non-arithmetic hyperbolic manifolds that arise from a gluing construction of Gromov and Piatetski-Shapiro. Perhaps surprisingly, the proof relies on an effective density theorem for certain periodic orbits. The effective density theorem uses a number of ideas including Margulis functions, a restricted projection theorem, and an effective equidistribution result for measures that are nearly full dimensional. This is joint work with K. W. Ohm.