Search for: All records

Diameter is one of the most basic properties of a geometric object, while Riemann surfaces are one of the most basic geometric objects. Surprisingly, the diameter of compact Riemann surfaces is known exactly only for the sphere and the torus. For higher genuses, only very general but loose upper and lower bounds are available. The problem of calculating the diameter exactly has been intractable since there is no simple expression for the distance between a pair of points on a high-genus surface. Here we prove that the diameters of a class of simple Riemann surfaces known as generalized Bolza surfaces of any genus greater than 1 are equal to the radii of their fundamental polygons. This is the first exact result for the diameter of a compact hyperbolic manifold. 

Abstract Riemann surfaces are among the simplest and most basic geometric objects. They appear as key players in many branches of physics, mathematics, and other sciences. Despite their widespread significance, how to compute distances between pairs of points on compact Riemann surfaces is surprisingly unknown, unless the surface is a sphere or a torus. This is because on higher-genus surfaces, the distance formula involves an infimum over infinitely many terms, so it cannot be evaluated in practice. Here we derive a computable distance formula for a broad class of Riemann surfaces. The formula reduces the infimum to a minimum over an explicit set consisting of finitely many terms. We also develop a distance computation algorithm, which cannot be expressed as a formula, but which is more computationally efficient on surfaces with high genuses. We illustrate both the formula and the algorithm in application to generalized Bolza surfaces, which are a particular class of highly symmetric compact Riemann surfaces of any genus greater than 1. 

Abstract Curvature is a fundamental geometric characteristic of smooth spaces. In recent years different notions of curvature have been developed for combinatorial discrete objects such as graphs. However, the connections between such discrete notions of curvature and their smooth counterparts remain lurking and moot. In particular, it is not rigorously known if any notion of graph curvature converges to any traditional notion of curvature of smooth space. Here we prove that in proper settings the Ollivier–Ricci curvature of random geometric graphs in Riemannian manifolds converges to the Ricci curvature of the manifold. This is the first rigorous result linking curvature of random graphs to curvature of smooth spaces. Our results hold for different notions of graph distances, including the rescaled shortest path distance, and for different graph densities. Here the scaling of the average degree, as a function of the graph size, can range from nearly logarithmic to nearly linear.