Normal families of Möbius maps (Q2228032)

For families \(\mathcal{F}\) of Mobius maps in the extended complex plane \(\mathbf{C}_{\infty}\) some refinements of known characterizations of normal families of meromorphic functions are determined. A family \(\mathcal{F}\) of functions, each meromorphic in a region \(\Omega\) in \(\mathbf{C}_{\infty}\), is a normal family in \(\Omega\) if each sequence taken from \(\mathcal{F}\) has a subsequence that converges uniformly with respect to the chordal metric \(\chi\) on each compact subset of \(\Omega\) to some meromorphic function (which may be the constant function \(\infty\)). Carathéodory extended Montel's well-known three omitted values theorem as follows: A family \(\mathcal{F}\) of functions, each meromorphic in a region \(\Omega\), is normal in \(\Omega\) if, for each \(f\) in \(\mathcal{F}\), there are 3 distinct values \(u_f\), \(v_f\), and \(w_f\) such that \(f \) omits these values in \(\Omega\) and \[ \inf\big\{\chi (u_f,v_f)\chi(v_f,w_f)\chi(w_f,u_f) : f\in {\mathcal{F}}\big\}> 0 \tag{\(*\)}. \] A family of triples \(\{ (u_f, v_f,w_f) : f \in {\mathcal{F}} \} \) satisfying \((*)\) is said to be uniformly separated. An exemplary theorem in the paper under review is Theorem 1. Theorem 1. For any family \(\mathcal{F}\) of Mobius maps the following are equivalent. \begin{itemize} \item[(a)] The family \(\mathcal{F}\) is normal in \(\mathbf{C}_{\infty}\). \item[(b)] For any uniformly separately set of triples \(\{ (u_f,v_f,w_f) : f\in \mathcal{F} \}\), the set \[\{ (f^{-1}(u_f), f^{-1}(v_f),f^{-1}(w_f)) : f\in \mathcal{F} \}\] is also uniformly separated. \item[(c)] There exists a uniformly separated set of triples \(\{ (u_f, v_f, w_f) f\in \mathcal{F} \}\) such that \[\{ (f^{-1}(u_f), f^{-1}(v_f),f^{-1}(w_f)) : f\in \mathcal{F} \}\] is uniformly separated. \end{itemize} An example given shows that separated triples in Theorem 1 cannot be replaced by separated pairs. The latter part of the paper contains an informative discussion of the geometry behind the results in the paper and then concludes by deriving a sufficient condition for the normality of a family of Mobius maps in terms of the average value of the reciprocal of the chordal derivative taken over \(\mathbf{C}_{\infty}\).