Related papers: Surgery on postcritically finite rational maps by …

Among Thurston maps (orientation-preserving, postcritically finite branched coverings of the 2-sphere to itself), those that arise as subdivision maps of a finite subdivision rule form a special family. For such maps, we investigate…

An orientation-preserving branched covering $f: S^2 \to S^2$ is a nearly Euclidean Thurston (NET) map if each critical point is simple and its postcritical set has exactly four points. Inspired by classical, non-dynamical notions such as…

This research report outlines work, partially joint with Jeremy Kahn and Kevin Pilgrim, which gives parallel theories of elastic graphs and conformal surfaces with boundary. One one hand, this lets us tell when one rubber band network is…

We consider Thurston maps, i.e., branched covering maps $f\colon S^2\to S^2$ that are postcritically finite. In addition, we assume that $f$ is expanding in a suitable sense. It is shown that each sufficiently high iterate $F=f^n$ of $f$ is…

We provide a natural canonical decomposition of postcritically finite rational maps with non-empty Fatou sets based on the topological structure of their Julia sets. The building blocks of this decomposition are maps where all Fatou…

We find all quadratic post-critically finite (PCF) rational maps defined over the rationals. We describe an algorithm to search for possibly PCF maps. Using the algorithm, we eliminate all but twelve rational maps, all of which are…

We consider "Thurston maps": branched self-coverings of the sphere with ultimately periodic critical points, and prove that the Thurston equivalence problem between them (continuous deformation of maps along with their critical orbits) is…

It is well known that the dynamical behavior of a rational map $f:\widehat{\mathbb C}\to \widehat{\mathbb C}$ is governed by the forward orbits of the critical points of $f$. The map $f$ is said to be postcritically finite if every critical…

The key result in the present paper is a direct analogue of the celebrated Thurston's Theorem for marked Thurston maps with parabolic orbifolds. Combining this result with previously developed techniques, we prove that every Thurston map…

In the second paper [LZ24b] of this series, we obtained an analog of the prime number theorem for a class of branched covering maps on the $2$-sphere $S^2$ called expanding Thurston maps, which are topological models of some non-uniformly…

For each integer $m \geq 1$, we construct a finite-dimensional family of rational maps, given by Blaschke-type products, whose restriction to the unit circle consists of $2m$-multimodal maps. We show that every post-critically finite…

We investigate the family of marked Thurston maps that are defined everywhere on the topological sphere $S^2$, potentially excluding at most countable closed set of essential singularities. We show that when an unmarked Thurston map $f$ is…

In this paper, we construct geometrically finite rational maps with buried critical points on the boundaries of some hyperbolic components by using the pinching and plumbing deformations.

We provide a complete combinatorial classification of critically fixed anti-Thurston maps, i.e., orientation-reversing branched covers of the 2-sphere that fix every critical point. The first step in the proof, and an interesting result in…

An endomorphism $f:\mathbb{P}^k\to\mathbb{P}^k$ of degree $d\geq2$ is said to be postcritically finite (or PCF) if its critical set $\mathrm{Crit}(f)$ is preperiodic, i.e. if there are integers $m>n\geq0$ such that…

We show how to extend Epstein's algebraic transversality principles for rational maps $f$ of ${\mathbb P}^1_{\mathbb C}$ to infinite forward invariant subsets of the Fatou set. The key, at least conceptually, to doing this is to have a…

In 1980's, Thurston established a combinatorial characterization for post-critically finite rational maps. This criterion was then extended by Cui, Jiang, and Sullivan to sub-hyperbolic rational maps. The goal of this paper is to present a…

Let $f$ be a postcritically finite rational map. We prove that, as $n$ large enough, there exists an $f^n$-invariant (finite connected) graph on $\widehat{\mathbb{C}}$ such that it contains the postcritical set of $f$.

We study rational self-maps of $\mathbb{P}^{1}$ whose critical points all have finite forward orbit. Thurston's rigidity theorem states that outside a single well-understood family, there are finitely many such maps over $\mathbb{C}$ of…

This paper deepens the connections between critically finite rational maps and finite subdivision rules. The main theorem is that if f is a critically finite rational map with no periodic critical points, then for any sufficiently large…