Orthodiagonal Maps, Tilings of Rectangles, and their Convergence to Conformal Maps

Abstract

A classic result of Brooks, Smith, Stone and Tutte associates to any finite planar network with distinguished source and sink vertices, a tiling of a rectangle by smaller subrectangles whose aspect ratios are given by the conductances of corresponding edges in the network. This tiling can be viewed as a discrete analogue of the uniformizing conformal map that maps a simply connected domain with four distinguished prime ends to a rectangle, so that the four prime ends are mapped to the four corners of the rectangle. \\ \\ We make this intuition precise by showing that if $\Omega$ is a simply connected domain with four distinguished prime ends $A,B,C,D$ in counterclockwise order and $(\Omega_{n})_{n\geq{1}}$ is a sequence of orthodiagonal maps with distinguished boundary vertices $A_{n}, B_{n}, C_{n}, D_{n}$ in counterclockwise order, that are finer and finer approximations of $\Omega$ with its distinguished boundary points $A,B,C,D$, then the corresponding ``rectangle tiling maps" converge uniformly on compacts to the aforementioned conformal map on $\Omega$.