On the hyperbolic distance of \(n\)-times punctured spheres (Q1996483)

The authors puncture the Riemann sphere at finitely many (and no less than three) points. They endow the punctured sphere with the complete hyperbolic metric in its conformal class. The age old problem with the hyperbolic metric is the difficulty in computing it explicitly. One part of this problem is to estimate effectively the systole (length of shortest geodesic) in that metric. The authors discover an estimate for the systole, given by an explicit expression in the logarithms of absolute cross ratios of the puncture locations, which they prove is comparable to the systole, with explicit constants. Their proof only uses the well-known collar lemma and a theorem from the book of Avkhadiev and Wirths. They then construct a metric, somewhat simpler than the hyperbolic metric to estimate, apparently, which they prove is Lipschitz equivalent to the hyperbolic metric, with a Lipschitz constant depending only on their estimate for the systole.