Transboundary extremal length (Q1909261)

The author gives a conceptually interesting, new, short proof to Koebe's conjecture in the countable case: every planar domain with countably many boundary components is conformally equivalent to a circle domain. The proof depends on correcting some of the defects which the powerful notion of extremal length suffers when applied to multiply connected domains; as sample defect we mention that, in multiply connected domains, extremal length is not invariant under conformal mappings. The author extends the notion of extremal length so as to take into account the shape of the complement of the domain. This extension requires two new concepts, namely ``transboundary extremal length'' and ``fat sets''. The results on uniformization extend to many domains with uncountably many boundary components and extend from circle domains to much more general domains.