Measured lamination spaces for surfaces, from the topological viewpoint (Q1113488)

The purpose of this paper is to develop the theory of measured laminations on surfaces in a purely topological way - that is without use of hyperbolic geometry. While the results are basically not new, the approach is felt to be the simplest and most direct. Moreover the author asserts that such an approach is necessary in treating measured laminations in 3-manifolds (a paper he has in preparation) as these are ``exclusively topological'' objects. In brief, the paper uses train tracks to construct, for a compact surface, M, a polyhedron, ML(M), whose ``integer points'' are the isotopy classes of curve systems on M and whose global structure is given by a simple inductive argument. The noninteger points of ML(M) are interpreted as measured laminations on M and the projectivization PL(M) is identified as the completion of the projective curve systems in M. The uniqueness of the piecewise linear structure on ML(M) is established by viewing measured laminations as length functionals on closed curves in M. A form of Thurston's structure theorem for diffeomorphisms is given, and the relations between measured laminations in M and actions of \(\pi_ 1(M)\) on \({\mathbb{R}}\)-trees is derived.