The convergence of circle packings to the Riemann mapping (Q909051)

Let R be a region in the plane or on the 2-sphere. A circle packing in R is a collection of closed disks contained in R with disjoint interiors. The nerve of the circle packing is the embedded 1-complex whose vertices are the centers of the disks and whose edges are the geodesic segments joining the centers of tangent disks and passing through the point of tangency. The authors consider only packings whose nerve is the 1- skeleton of a triangulation of some open connected subset in the plane or on the sphere and a circle packing of the sphere is one whose associated triangulation is a triangulation of the sphere. A remarkable theorem of Andreev states that any triangulation of the sphere is isomorphic to the triangulation associated to some circle packing of the sphere. Thurston gave an algorithm for finding this circle packing and he conjectured that the scheme could be used to provide a constructive approximation to the Riemann mapping function between a bounded simply connected domain R and the unit disk. The idea is to almost fill R with small circles of radius \(\epsilon\) from a regular hexagonal packing. These circles, together with the point at \(\infty\), generate a triangulation of the sphere. Andreev's theorem is then applied to produce a combinatorially equivalent packing of the sphere with the circle covering \(\infty\) taken to be the exterior of the unit circle. (Certain normalizations are applied to make the correspondence unique.) The correspondence between the circles of the two packings should then approximate the Riemann mapping. The authors give an elegant proof of Thurston's conjecture. In particular, they associate to each \(\epsilon\) the piecewise linear function \(f_{\epsilon}\) of the sphere onto itself which is determined by the mapping of the vertices of the triangles given by Thurston's algorithm. These mappings are uniformly K-quasiconformal for K independent of \(\epsilon\), so that they are equicontinuous on compacta and form a normal family. It is then shown that any limit function f is equal to the unique normalized conformal mapping of R onto the disk.