Systoles and kissing numbers of finite area hyperbolic surfaces (Q907774)

Given a closed surface, its systole length is the length of a shortest closed geodesic. The kissing number of a surface is the number of disjoint open unit balls that are tangent to a fixed unit ball. There has been much research into how these notions are related and finding bounds depending on the topological data of the surface. The paper under review contains an extensive bibliography for the reader interested in this problem. The main contribution of the paper under review is to the case of surfaces with cusps. In particular, the authors obtain an upper bound of the kissing number of a surface of genus \(g\) and with \(n\) cusps, where the upper bound depends only on \(n\) and \(g\). Moreover an upper bound for the kissing number is obtained where the upper bound depends additionally on the systole length of the surface. The techniques involved use hyperbolic geometry and studying topological configurations of systoles.