The nature of finitely generated infinite index subgroups of SL(3,Z) remains extremely mysterious. It follows from the famous theorem of Tits [12] that free groups abound and, moreover, Zariski dense free groups abound. Less trivially, classical arithmetic considerations (see for example §6.1 of [9]) can be used to construct surface subgroups of SL(3,Z) of every genus ≥ 2. However these are con...