arXiv subjects
Publications and source records attributed to Ian Short.
We describe how to represent Rosen continued fractions by paths in a class of graphs that arise naturally in hyperbolic geometry. This representation gives insight into Rosen's original work about words in Hecke groups, and it also helps us to identify Rosen continued fraction expansions of shortest length.
We prove that if $G$ is a finite simple group of Lie type and $S$ a subset of $G$ of size at least two then $G$ is a product of at most $c\log|G|/\log|S|$ conjugates of $S$, where $c$ depends only on the Lie rank of $G$. This confirms a conjecture of Liebeck, Nikolov and Shalev in the case of families of simple groups of Lie type of bounded rank.
We describe necessary and sufficient conditions for an orientation preserving fixed point free planar homeomorphism that preserves the standard Reeb foliation to embed in a planar flow that leaves the foliation invariant.
We give an elementary geometric proof using Ford circles that the convergents of the continued fraction expansion of a real number $α$ coincide with the rationals that are best approximations of the second kind of $α$.
We answer two questions of Beardon and Minda that arose from their study of the conformal symmetries of circular regions in the complex plane. We show that a configuration of closed balls in the $N$-sphere is determined up to Möbius transformations by the signed inversive distances between pairs of its elements, except when the boundaries of the balls have a point in common, and that a configuration of points in the $N$-sphere is determined by the absolute cross-ratios of 4-tuples of its elements. The proofs use the hyperboloid model of hyperbolic $(N+1)$-space.
An element of a group is said to be reversible if it is conjugate to its inverse. We characterise the reversible elements in the group of diffeomorphisms of the real line, and in the subgroup of order preserving diffeomorphisms.
We complete the program begun by Brin and Squier of characterising conjugacy in Thompson's group $F$ using the standard action of $F$ as a group of piecewise linear homeomorphisms of the unit interval.
An element of a group is \emph{reversible} if it is conjugate to its own inverse, and it is \emph{strongly reversible} if it is conjugate to its inverse by an involution. A group element is strongly reversible if and only if it can be expressed as a composite of two involutions. In this paper the reversible maps, the strongly reversible maps, and those maps that can be expressed as a composite of involutions are determined in certain groups of piecewise linear homeomorphisms of the real line.
We identify those elements of the homeomorphism group of the circle that can be expressed as a composite of two involutions.
Inspired by questions of convergence in continued fraction theory, Erdős, Piranian and Thron studied the possible sets of divergence for arbitrary sequences of Möbius maps acting on the Riemann sphere, $S^2$. By identifying $S^2$ with the boundary of three-dimensional hyperbolic space, $H^3$, we show that these sets of divergence are precisely the sets that arise as conical limit sets of subsets of $H^3$. Using hyperbolic geometry, we give simple geometric proofs of the theorems of Erdős, Piranian and Thron that generalise to arbitrary dimensions. New results are also obtained about the class of conical limit sets, for example, that it is closed under locally quasisymmetric homeomorphisms. Applications are given to continued fractions.
Brin and Squier described how to classify the elements of the group of piecewise linear homeomorphisms of the real line according to conjugacy. We supply a short account of the key step in their classification. The results in this document are unoriginal. The proofs are a little sketchy in places.