Almost simple geodesics on the triply-punctured sphere

Abstract: Every closed hyperbolic geodesic

g a m m a

on the triply--punctured sphere

M = w i d e h a t m a t h b b C - 0, 1, i n f t y

has a self--intersection number

I (g a m m a) g e 1

and a combinatorial length

L (g a m m a) g e 2

, the latter defined by the number of times

g a m m a

passes through the upper halfplane. In this paper we show that

d e l t a (g a m m a) = I (g a m m a) - L (g a m m a) g e - 1

for all closed geodesics; and that for each fixed

d e l t a

, the number of geodesics with invariants

(d e l t a, L)

is given exactly by a quadratic polynomial

p_{d} e l t a (L)

for all

L g e 4 + d e l t a

.

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