Circle homeomorphisms and shears (Q611913)

The topological group \(\text{Homeo}(S^1)\) of orientation preserving homeomorphisms of the circle plays a role in a number of areas of mathematics. Its subspaces \(QS(S^1)\) and \(\text{Sym}(S^1)\) of quasisymmetric and (locally) symmetric mappings also are of great interest to Teichmüller theory. The paper under review provides an explicit parameterization of these spaces under the normalization of requiring three points of \(S^1\) to be fixed. This is the first explicit parameterization of these spaces. The parameterization is achieved through shear coordinates on the Farey tesselation of the hyperbolic plane (viewing \(S^1\) as the boundary at infinity of the hyperbolic plane), terms which we will briefly outline. The Farey tesselation \(\mathcal{F}\) of the hyperbolic plane is a locally finite ideal triangulation of the plane which is preserved under reflections in the geodesics of \(\mathcal{F}\). Given two ideal hyperbolic triangles \(T,T'\) with disjoint interiors and a common boundary side \(e\), the shear of the pair \((T,T')\) is the signed hyperbolic distance between the orthogonal projections of the respective third vertices onto \(e\). A homeomorphism \(h:S^1 \to S^1\) induces a shear function \(s_h:\mathcal{F} \to \mathbb{R}\) defined as follows. Given a geodesic \(e \in \mathcal{F}\) which is the common boundary component of \((T,T')\), \(s_h(e)\) is defined to be the shear of the pair \((h(T),h(T'))\). In this paper, the shear functions which arise from homeomorphisms, quasisymmetric maps and symmetric maps are classified. This well written paper contains extensive details on the notions involved, an interpretation of the Teichmüller topology in terms of the topology induced by the parameterization here and further characterizations of the mappings of interest by so-called lambda length functions.