  It is known since 1954 that every 3-manifold bounds a 4-manifold. Thus, for
instance, every 3-manifold has a surgery diagram. There are several proofs of
this fact, including constructive proofs, but there has been little attention
to the complexity of the 4-manifold produced. Given a 3-manifold M of
complexity n, we show how to construct a 4-manifold bounded by M of complexity
O(n^2). Here we measure ``complexity'' of a piecewise-linear manifold by the
minimum number of n-simplices in a triangulation. It is an open question
whether this quadratic bound can be replaced by a linear bound.
  The proof goes through the notion of "shadow complexity" of a 3-manifold M. A
shadow of M is a well-behaved 2-dimensional spine of a 4-manifold bounded by M.
We prove that, for a manifold M satisfying the Geometrization Conjecture with
Gromov norm G and shadow complexity S, c_1 G <= S <= c_2 G^2 for suitable
constants c_1, c_2. In particular, the manifolds with shadow complexity 0 are
the graph manifolds.
