In this paper, we show that the analogue of Thurston's asymmetric metric on the Teichm{ü}ller space of flat structures on the torus is weak Finsler and we give a geometric description of its unit sphere at each point in the tangent space to Teichm{ü}ller space. We then introduce a family of weak Finsler metrics which interpolate between Thurston's asymmetric metric and the Teichm{ü}ller metric of the torus (which coincides with the the hyperbolic metric). We describe the infinitesimal unit spheres of the metrics in this family.The final version of this paper will appear in Annales Academiæ \ Scientiarum Fennicæ\ Mathematica.
In this paper, we introduce a new asymmetric weak metric on the Teichm{ü}ller space of a closed orientable surface with (possibly empty) punctures.This new metric, which we call the Teichm{ü}ller-Randers metric, is an asymmetric deformation of the Teichm{ü}ller metric, and is obtained by adding to the infinitesimal form of the Teichm{ü}ller metric a differential 1-form. We study basic properties of the Teichm{ü}ller-Randers metric. In the case when the 1-form is exact, any Teichm{ü}ller geodesic between two points is a unique Teichm{ü}ller--Randers geodesic between them. A particularly interes…
We survey some major contributions to Riemann's moduli space and Teichm{ü}ller space. Our report has a historical character, but the stress is on the chain of mathematical ideas. We start with the introduction of Riemann surfaces, and we end with the discovery of some of the basic structures of Riemann's moduli space and Teichm{ü}ller space. We point out several facts which seem to be unknown to many algebraic geometers and analysts working in the theory. The period we are interested in starts with Riemann, in 1851, and ends in the early 1960s, when Ahlfors and Bers confirmed that Teichm{ü}lle…
This is a commentary on Teichm{ü}ller's paper Unter-suchungen{ü}ber konforme und quasikonforme Abbildungen (Inves-tigations on conformal and quasiconformal mappings) published in 1938. The paper contains fundamental results in conformal geometry , in particular a lemma, known as the Modulsatz, which insures the almost circularity of certain loci defined as complementary components of simply connected regions in the Riemann sphere, and another lemma, which we call the Main Lemma, which insures the circularity near infinity of the image of circles by a qua-siconformal map. The two results find w…
This is a mathematical commentary on Teichm{ü}ller's paper ``Bestimmung der extremalen quasikonformen Abbildungen bei geschlossenen orientierten Riemannschen Fl{ä}chen'' (Determination of extremal quasiconformal maps of closed oriented Riemann surfaces). This paper is among the last (and may be the last one) that Teichm{ü}ller wrote on the theory of moduli. It contains the proof of the so-called Teichm{ü}ller existence theorem for a closed surface of genus at least 2. For this proof, the author defines a mapping between a space of equivalence classes of marked Riemann surfaces (the Teichm{ü}ll…
We provide a commentary on Teichm{ü}ller's paper "Extremale quasikonforme Abbildungen und quadratische Differentiale" (Extremal quasiconformal mappings of closed oriented Riemann surfaces), Abh. Preuss. Akad. Wiss., Math.-Naturw. Kl. 1940, No.22, 1-197 (1940). The paper is quoted in several works, although it was read by very few people. Some of the results it contains were rediscovered later on and published without any reference to Teichm{ü}ller.In this commentary, we highlight the main results and the main ideas contained in that paper and we describe some of the important developments they…
The type problem is the problem of deciding, for a simply connected Riemann surface, whether it is conformally equivalent to the complex plane or to the unit dic in the complex plane. We report on Teichm{ü}ller's results on the type problem from his two papers Eine Anwendung quasikonformer Abbildungen auf das Typenproblem (An application of quasiconformal map-pings to the type problem) (1937) and Untersuchungen{ü}ber kon-forme und quasikonforme Abbildungen (Investigations on con-formal and quasiconformal mappings) (1938). They concern simply connected Riemann surfaces defined as branched cover…
This survey will appear in Vol. VII of the Hendbook of Teichm{ü}ller theory (European Mathematical Society Publishing House, 2020). It is a commentary on Teichm{ü}ller's paper "Einfache Beispiele zur Wertverteilungslehre", published in 1944, whose English translation appears in that volume. Together with Teichm{ü}ller's paper, we survey the development of value distribution theory, in the period starting from Gauss's work on the Fundamental Theorem of Algebra and ending with the work of Teichm{ü}ller. We mention the foundational work of several mathematicians, including Picard, Laguerre, Poinc…
This is a commentary on Teichm{ü}ller's paper Ein Verschiebungssatz der quasikonformen Abbildung (A displacement theorem of quasiconformal mapping), published in 1944. We explain in detail how Teichm{ü}ller solves the problem of finding the quasiconformal mapping from the unit disc to itself, sending 0 to a strictly negative point on the real line, holding the boundary of the disc pointwise fixed and with the smallest quasiconformal dilatation. We mention also some consequences of this extremal problem and we ask a question.
The aim of these lecture notes is, after having quickly described various compactifications of the Teichmüller space of a compact connected oriented surface minus finitely many points, to give a construction, by the equivariant Gromov topology introduced by the author, of Thurston's compactification of this Teichmüller space.
We study the geometry of hyperbolic cone surfaces, possibly with cusps or geodesic boundaries. We prove that any hyperbolic cone structure on a surface of non-exceptional type is determined up to isotopy by the geodesic lengths of a finite specific homotopy classes of non-peripheral simple closed curves. As an application, we show that the Thurston asymmetric metric is well-defined on the Teichmüller space of hyperbolic cone surfaces with fixed cone angles and boundary lengths. We compare such a Teichmüller space with the Teichmüller space of complete hyperbolic surfaces with punctures, by sho…
We show that every $\mathbb R$-linear surjective isometry between the cotangent spaces to the Teichmüller space equipped with the Thurston norm is induced by some isometry between the underlying hyperbolic surfaces, which is an analogue of Royden's theorem concerning the Teichmüller metric.
Nicolas-Auguste Tissot (1824--1897) was a French mathematician and cartographer. He introduced a tool which became known among geographers under the name ``Tissot indicatrix'', and which was widely used during the first half of the twentieth century in cartography. This is a graphical representation of a field of ellipses, indicating at each point of a geographical map the distorsion of this map, both in direction and in magnitude. Each ellipse represented at a given point is the image of an infinitesimal circle in the domain of the map (generally speaking, a sphere representing the surface of…
For a compact surface $X_0$, Thurston introduced a compactification of its Teichmüller space $\mathcal T(X_0)$ by completing it with a boundary $\mathcal{PML}(X_0)$ consisting of projective measured geodesic laminations. We introduce a similar bordification for the Teichmüller space $\mathcal T(X_0)$ of a noncompact Riemann surface $X_0$, using the technical tool of geodesic currents. The lack of compactness requires the introduction of certain uniformity conditions which were unnecessary for compact surfaces. A technical step, providing a convergence result for earthquake paths in $\mathcal T…
We prove that the Teichmüller space of surfaces with given boundary lengths equipped with the arc metric (resp. the Teichmüller metric) is almost isometric to the Teichmüller space of punctured surfaces equipped with the Thurston metric (resp. the Teichmüller metric).
A measured laminations on the universal hyperbolic solenoid $§$ is, by our definition, a leafwise measured lamination with appropriate continuity for the transverse variations. An earthquakes on theuniversal hyperbolic solenoid $§$ is uniquely determined by a measured lamination on $§$; it is a leafwise earthquake with the leafwise earthquake measure equal to the leafwise measured lamination. Leafwise earthquakes fit together to produce a new hyperbolic metric on $§$ which is transversely continuous and we show that any two hyperbolic metrics on $§$ are connected by an earthquake. We also esta…
Thurston's boundary to the universal Teichmüller space $T(\mathbb{H})$ is the set of asymptotic rays to the embedding of $T(\mathbb{H})$ in the space of geodesic currents; the boundary is identified with the projective bounded measured laminations $PML_{bdd}(\mathbb{H})$ of $\mathbb{H}$. We prove that each Teichmüller geodesic ray in $T(\mathbb{H})$ has a unique limit point in Thurston's boundary to $T(\mathbb{H})$ unlike in the case of closed surfaces.
Let $f$ be a postcritically finite branched self-cover of a 2-dimensional topological sphere. Such a map induces an analytic self-map $σ_f$ of a finite-dimensional Teichmüller space. We prove that this map extends continuously to the augmented Teichmüller space and give an explicit construction for this extension. This allows us to characterize the dynamics of Thurston's pullback map near invariant strata of the boundary of the augmented Teichmüller space. The resulting classification of invariant boundary strata is used to prove a conjecture by Pilgrim and to infer further properties of Thurs…
Using the identification of the symmetric space $\mathrm{SL}(n,\mathbb{R})/\mathrm{SO}(n)$ with the Teichmüller space of flat $n$-tori of unit volume, we explore several metrics and compactifications of these spaces, drawing inspiration both from Teichmüller theory and symmetric spaces. We define and study analogs of the Thurston, Teichmüller, and Weil-Petersson metrics. We show the Teichmüller metric is a symmetrization of the Thurston metric, which is a polyhedral Finsler metric, and the Weil-Petersson metric is the Riemannian metric of $\mathrm{SL}(n,\mathbb{R})/\mathrm{SO}(n)$ as a symmetr…
This is the first paper in a series of investigation of the pluripotential theory on Teichmüller space. The main purpose of this paper is to give an alternative approach to the Krushkal formula of the pluricomplex Green function on Teichmüller space. We also show that Teichmüller space carries a natural stratified structure of real-analytic submanifolds defined from the structure of singularities of the initial differentials of the Teichmüller mappings from a given point. We will also give a description of the Levi form of the pluricomplex Green function using the Thurston symplectic form via …
We consider the limiting behavior of Teichmüller geodesics in the universal Teichmüller space $T(\mathbb{H})$. Our main result states that the limits of the Teichmüller geodesics in the Thurston's boundary of $T(\mathbb{H})$ may depend on both vertical and horizontal foliation of the corresponding holomorphic quadratic differential.
On a convex body in a Euclidean space, we introduce a new variational formulation for its Funk metric, a Finsler metric compatible with the tautological Finsler structure of the convex body. We generalize the metric on Teichmuller spaces with the Weil-Petersson distance function. A set of similarities the resulting metric structure shares with Thurston's asymmetric metric is noted.
