arXiv subjects
Publications and source records attributed to Harriet H. Moser.
The purpose of this paper is to establish an upper bound on the distance between two pants decompositions in the pants complex for a closed surface of genus g >= 2. This is done by use of graph theory. First distance is found in the pants graph modulo the action of the mapping class group, and then between pants decompositions within an orbit of this action.
The computer program SnapPea can approximate whether or not a three manifold whose boundary consists of tori has a complete hyperbolic structure, but it can not prove conclusively that this is so. This article provides a method for proving that such a manifold has a complete hyperbolic structure based on the approximations of SNAP, a program that includes the functionality of SnapPea plus other features. The approximation is done by triangulating the manifold, identifying consistency and completeness equations with respect to this triangulation, and then trying to solve the system of equations using Newton's Method. This produces an approximate, not actual solution. The method developed here uses Kantorovich's theorem to prove that an actual solution exists, thereby assuring that the manifold has a complete hyperbolic structure. Using this, we can definitively prove that every manifold in the SnapPea cusped census has a complete hyperbolic structure.