Counting geodesics between surface triangulations
Given a compact orientable surface \(\Sigma\) (possibly with boundary) with a fixed set \(P \subset \Sigma\) of marked points, such that each boundary curve of \(\Sigma\) contains at least one marked point, the authors consider triangulations of \(\Sigma\) with vertex set \(P\). Note that triangulations, as considered here, are not simplicial complexes, since the vertices of triangles are allowed to coincide and the edges are generally curved.\N\N\textbf{The focus of the paper} is the \textit{flip-graph} \(\mathcal{F}(\Sigma)\), whose vertices correspond to the isotopy classes of triangulations of \(\Sigma\) over the fixed vertex set \(P\), and two vertices of \(\mathcal{F}(\Sigma)\) are connected by an edge if and only if the corresponding triangulations are related by a single elementary move called a \textit{(diagonal) flip}. While flip-graphs typically have an infinite number of vertices (with the exception of a few cases that are discussed in the paper), the vertex degrees of \(\mathcal{F}(\Sigma)\) are uniformly bounded. Moreover, according to a classical and well-known result in low-dimensional combinatorial topology, \(\mathcal{F}(\Sigma)\) is always connected, see e.g. [\textit{A. E. Hatcher}, Topology Appl. 40, No. 2, 189--194 (1991; Zbl 0727.57012)]. These types of flip-graphs naturally arise in the study of moduli spaces and mapping class groups, see [\textit{V. Disarlo} and \textit{H. Parlier}, Trans. Am. Math. Soc. 372, No. 6, 3809--3844 (2019; Zbl 1423.57004)] and [\textit{H. Parlier} and \textit{L. Pournin}, J. Eur. Math. Soc. 19, No. 9, 2697--2737 (2017; Zbl 1369.05055)].\N\NThe flip-graph \(\mathcal{F}(\Sigma)\) can be regarded as a metric space, where the distance of two vertices \(v,v' \in V(\mathcal{F}(\Sigma))\) is defined as the length of a shortest path between \(v\) and \(v'\) in \(\mathcal{F}(\Sigma)\). If \(T\) and \(T'\) denote triangulations of \(\Sigma\) that respectively correspond to \(v\) and \(v'\), this distance equals the smallest number of flips required to transform \(T\) into \(T'\).\N\N\textbf{The authors' primary interest} is the largest number \(\Delta_k(\Sigma)\) of geodesics in \(\mathcal{F}(\Sigma)\) between any two vertices at distance \(k\). (The number of geodesics between two points in a metric space plays an important role in understanding the dynamical, geometric, and topological properties of that space.) The authors prove that, when the surface \(\Sigma\) has sufficiently complicated topology, \(\Delta_k(\Sigma)\) grows exponentially in terms of \(k\). In all other cases, the growth is shown to be polynomial in \(k\).\N\NBoth the introduction and the proofs are accompanied by carefully prepared, high-quality illustrations.
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