Monotonicity and comparison results for conformal invariants (Q1941169)

Let \(\Theta : 0=\theta_0 < \theta_1 < \dots < \theta_N = 2\pi\) be a partition of \([0; 2\pi]\) and let \(\delta(\Theta) = \max (\theta_{k+1} - \theta_{k}).\) Let \(\Omega = \overline{\mathbb{C}}\setminus \{a_0, a_1, \dots , a_{N-1} \},\) \(a_k = e^{i \theta_k}\). How should one choose \(a_0, a_1, \dots , a_{N-1}\) subject to the condition \(\delta(\Theta ) \leq \frac{2\pi}{n} \), so that the Poincarè metric \(\lambda_{\Omega}(0)\) of \(\Omega \) at the origin is as small as possible? The authors prove that \(\lambda_{\Omega}(0) \geq \lambda_{\Omega^\ast}(0)\), where \[ \Omega^\ast = \overline{\mathbb{C}}\setminus \left\{1, e^{\frac{2\pi i}{n}}, \dots , e^{\frac{2\pi (n-1) i}{n}} \right\} . \] The authors solve some other extremal problems involving harmonic measures and capacities. These results are consequences of the investigations of the authors on differential equations of the form \[ \Delta u (z) = \gamma(u) + f(z). \] The main result is formulated in a fairly complicated way.