The hyperbolic meaning of the Milnor-Wood inequality

DOI10.1016/J.EXMATH.2011.08.002MaRDI QIDQ765899zbMATH OpenOpenAlexFDO

Authors Daniel Mathews

Publication date 22 March 2012

Published in Expositiones Mathematicae (Search for Journal in Brave)

Full work available at URL https://arxiv.org/abs/1006.5403

zbMATH Keywords

hyperbolic geometryMilnor-Wood inequality

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

General geometric structures on low-dimensional manifolds (57M50)

Abstract: We introduce a notion of the twist of an isometry of the hyperbolic plane. This twist function is defined on the universal covering group of orientation-preserving isometries of the hyperbolic plane, at each point in the plane. We relate this function to a function defined by Milnor and generalised by Wood. We deduce various properties of the twist function, and use it to give new proofs of several well-known results, including the Milnor--Wood inequality, using purely hyperbolic-geometric methods. Our methods express inequalities in Milnor's function as equalities, with the deficiency from equality given by an area in the hyperbolic plane. We find that the twist of certain products found in surface group presentations is equal to the area of certain hyperbolic polygons arising as their fundamental domains.

Review text

In this paper the author introduces a twist function Tw. This function assigns a real number to a point in the closure of the hyperbolic plane and an element in \(\widetilde{PSL(2,\mathbb{R})}\) , the universal covering of the isometry group of the hyperbolic plane. The twist function is a generalization of the translation-quasimorphism on \(\widetilde{PSL(2,\mathbb{R})}\), which coincides with the twist function when evaluated at a specific point in the hyperbolic plane. The author gives relations between the twist function of commutators and hyperbolic area of polygons. The paper discusses the relation between the twist function and the translation-quasimorphism, but does not give much background on quasimorphisms and related results. For this the reader can consult e.g. Calegari's book on ``scl.

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Cited in

(2)

• scientific article; zbMATH DE number 1188905 (Why is no real title available?)
• The inequality of Milne and its converse

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