Related papers: A remark on the word length in surface groups

Given an infinite linear group with a finite set of generators, we show that the shortest word length of an element of infinite order has an upper bound that depends only on the number of generators and the degree. This provides a…

We study word maps with constants on symmetric groups. Even though there are mixed identities of bounded length that are valid for all symmetric groups, we show that no such identities hold in a metric sense. Moreover, we prove that word…

Let $S$ be a closed orientable hyperbolic surface, and let $\mathcal{O}(K,S)$ denote the number of mapping class group orbits of curves on $S$ with at most $K$ self-intersections. Building on work of Sapir [16], we give upper and lower…

Let $\mathcal{C}(S_{g,p})$ denote the curve complex of the closed orientable surface of genus $g$ with $p$ punctures. Masur-Minksy and subsequently Bowditch showed that $\mathcal{C}(S_{g,p})$ is $\delta$-hyperbolic for some…

On a surface with a Finsler metric, we investigate the asymptotic growth of the number of closed geodesics of length less than $L$ which minimize length among all geodesic multicurves in the same homology class. An important class of…

We prove a quantitative estimate with a power saving error term for the number of filling closed geodesics of a given topological type and length $\leq L$ on an arbitrary closed, orientable, negatively curved surface. More generally, we…

Given a finitely generated group with generating set $S$, we study the cogrowth sequence, which is the number of words of length $n$ over the alphabet $S$ that are equal to one. This is related to the probability of return for walks the…

Let $S$ be a hyperbolic oriented Riemann surface of finite type. The main purpose of this paper is to show that non-trivial geometric intersection between closed curves on $S$ is detected by some symplectic submodules they naturally…

Let $\Sigma$ be a surface with negative Euler characteristic, genus at least one and at most one boundary component. We prove that the skein algebra of $\Sigma$ over the field of rational functions can be algebraically generated by a finite…

We study topological properties of random closed curves on an orientable surface $S$ of negative Euler characteristic. Letting $\gamma_{n}$ denote the conjugacy class of the $n^{th}$ step of a simple random walk on the Cayley graph driven…

Suppose a smooth planar curve $\gamma$ is $2\pi$-periodic in the $x$ direction and the length of one period is $\ell$. It is shown that if $\gamma$ self-intersects, then it has a segment of length $\ell- 2\pi$ on which it self-intersects…

Since the 1970's, physicists and mathematicians who study random matrices in the GUE or GOE models are aware of intriguing connections between integrals of such random matrices and enumeration of graphs on surfaces. We establish a new…

Let $ S $ be a hyperbolic surface. We investigate the topology of the space of all curves on $ S $ which start and end at given points in given directions, and whose curvatures are constrained to lie in a given interval $…

We prove that the word problem in the mapping class group of the once-punctured surface of genus g has complexity O(|w|^2 g for |w| > log(g) where |w| is the length of the word in a (standard) set of generators. The corresponding bound in…

Consider a one-ended word-hyperbolic group. If it is the fundamental group of a graph of free groups with cyclic edge groups then either it is the fundamental group of a surface or it contains a finitely generated one-ended subgroup of…

A morphic word is obtained by iterating a morphism to generate an infinite word, and then applying a coding. We characterize morphic words with polynomial growth in terms of a new type of infinite word called a $\textit{zigzag word}$. A…

We study the symmetry groups and winding numbers of planar curves obtained as images of weighted sums of exponentials. More generally, we study the image of the complex unit circle under a finite or infinite Laurent series using a…

Mapping class groups are known to admit geometric (proper, cobounded) actions on injective spaces. Starting with such an action, and relying only on geometric arguments, we show that all finite generating sets resulting from taking large…

Given a compact orientable surface of negative Euler characteristic, there exists a natural pairing between the Teichmueuller space of the surface and the set of homotopy classes of simple loops and arcs. The length pairing sends a…

We study the girth of Cayley graphs of finite classical groups G on random sets of generators. Our main tool is an essentially best possible bound we obtain on the probability that a given word w takes the value 1 when evaluated in G in…