THE COMPLEXITY OF RIEMANN SURFACES AND THE HURWITZ EXISTENCE PROBLEM

Abstract: oindent Given a Riemann surface

M

, the emph{complexity} of a branched cover of

M

to the Riemann sphere

S^{2}

, of degree

d

and with branching set of cardinality

n g e q 3

, is defined as

d

times the hyperbolic area of the complement of its branching set in

S^{2}

. A branched cover

p c o l o n M o S^{2}

of degree

d

is emph{simple} if the cardinality of the pre-image

p^{- 1} (y)

is at least

d - 1

for all

y i n S^{2}

. The emph{(simple) complexity} of

M

is defined as the infimum of the complexities of all (simple) branched covers of

M

to

S^{2}

. We prove that if

M

is a closed, connected, orientable Riemann surface of genus

g g e q 1

, then: (1) its simple complexity equals

8 p i g

, and (2) its complexity equals

2 p i (m_{e x t m i n} + 2 g - 2)

, where

m_{e x t m i n}

is the minimum total length of a branch datum realizable by a branched cover

p c o l o n M o S^{2}

.

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