Virasoro constraints and topological recursion for Grothendieck's dessin counting (Q2355064)

In this paper, the number of coverings of \(\mathbb{C}P^1 \setminus \{0,1,\infty \}\) with a given monodromy type over \(\infty\) and given numbers of preimages of 0 and 1 are computed. It is shown that the generating function for these numbers enjoys several remarkable integrability properties: it obeys the Virasoro constraints, an evolution equation, the Kadomtsev-Petviashvili hierarchy, and satisfies a topological recursion in the sense of Eynard-Orantin. The objective of this paper is to show that the generating function satisfies all four integrability properties -- namely, Virasoro constraints, an evolution equation, the Kadomtsev-Petviashvili hierarchy, and a topological recursion. It also revisits the problem of enumeration of ribbon graphs with a prescribed boundary type. Several examples are suggested that demonstrate that Virasoro constraints imply topological recursion and are in fact equivalent to it. Additionally, it is shown how these results can be applied to effectively enumerate orientable maps and hypermaps regardless of the boundary type. In particular, a very straightforward derivation of the famous Harer-Zagier recursion is presented for the numbers of genus \(g\) polygon gluings from the Walsh-Lehman formula.