Given a closed hyperbolic surface, a geodesic lamination is a closed subset of a union of disjoint complete hyperbolic geodesics. In 1980's, Thurston used the geodesic laminations to study a series of topics about Teichmuller space and the automorphism of closed surfaces. In this short course, we will introduce Thurston's works on surfaces based on geodesic laminations.

First we will overview some aspects about hyperbolic surfaces, and introduce the structure of geodesic laminations. Then we will see how to apply geodesic laminations to give a compactness of Teichmuller space and a classification of surfaces automorphisms.