Ken Shackleton, 25 septembre 2008, 11h15, MA 12

Title: On computing distances in the pants complex

Abstract: The pants complex is an accurate combinatorial
model for the Weil-Petersson metric (WP) on Teichmueller space
(Brock). One hopes that many of the geometric properties
of WP are accurately replicated in the pants complex, and
this is the source of many open questions. We compare these
in general, and then focus on the 5-holed sphere and the
2-holed torus, the first non-trivial surfaces. We arrive at
an algorithm for computing distances in the (1-skeleton of the)
pants complex of either surface.