On locally quasiconformal Teichmüller spaces (Q2663054)

The authors define and study a ``universal Teichmüller space'', that is, a space of equivalence classes of quasiconformal homeomorphisms of the disk, where these homeomorphisms are locally quasiconformal mappings, that is, the global dilatation is not necessarily bounded. They obtain existence and uniqueness results for extremal mappings of such generalized Teichmüller classes whose dilatation constant grows not faster than a certain rate, and they analyze the resulting circle maps. The modern study of quasiconformal mappings with unbounded dilatation attracted significant attention after the publication of the work of \textit{G. David} [Ann. Acad. Sci. Fenn., Ser. A I, Math. 13, No. 1, 25--70 (1988; Zbl 0619.30024)]. The reviewer would like to point out that quasiconformal mappings with unbounded dilatation were already studied by Teichmüller in his long paper \emph{Untersuchungen über konforme und quasikonforme Abbildungen}. Teichmüller declares in particular that with the boundedness assumption ``one does not necessarily get to the intended function-theoretic applications''; see the English translation [\textit{O. Teichmüller}, IRMA Lect. Math. Theor. Phys. 30, 463--529 (2020; Zbl 1446.30010)].