Hyperbolic geometry in the work of Johann Heinrich Lambert

The memoir Theorie der Parallellinien (1766) by Johann Heinrich Lambert is one of the founding texts of hyperbolic geometry, even though its author's aim was, like many of his pre-decessors', to prove that such a geometry does not exist. In fact, Lambert developed his theory with the hope of finding a contradiction in a geometry where all the Euclidean axioms are kept except the parallel axiom and that the latter is replaced by its negation. In doing so, he obtained several fundamental results of hyperbolic geometry. This was sixty years before the first writings of Lobachevsky and Bolyai appeared in print. In the present paper, we present Lambert's main results and we comment on them. A French translation of the Theorie der Parallellinien, together with an extensive commentary, has just appeared in print (A. Papadopoulos and G. Th{\'e}ret, La th{\'e}orie des lignes parall{\`e}les de Johann Heinrich Lambert. Collection Sciences dans l'Histoire, Librairie Scientifique et Technique Albert Blanchard, Paris, 2014)

Some Lipschitz maps between hyperbolic surfaces with applications to Teichmüller theory

International audienceIn the Teichmüller space of a hyperbolic surface of finite type, we construct geodesic lines for Thurston's asymmetric metric having the property that when they are traversed in the reverse direction, they are also geodesic lines (up to reparametrization). The lines we construct are special stretch lines in the sense of Thurston. They are directed by complete geodesic laminations that are not chain-recurrent, and they have a nice description in terms of Fenchel-Nielsen coordinates. At the basis of the construction are certain maps with controlled Lipschitz constants between right-angled hyperbolic hexagons having three non-consecutive edges of the same size. Using these maps, we obtain Lipschitz-minimizing maps between hyperbolic particular pairs of pants and, more generally, between some hyperbolic sufaces of finite type with arbitrary genus and arbitrary number of boundary components. The Lipschitz-minimizing maps that we contruct are distinct from Thurston's stretch maps

Lower large deviations and laws of large numbers for maximal flows through a box in first passage percolation

We consider the standard first passage percolation model in $\mathbb{Z}^d$ for $d\geq 2$. We are interested in two quantities, the maximal flow $\tau$ between the lower half and the upper half of the box, and the maximal flow $\phi$ between the top and the bottom of the box. A standard subadditive argument yields the law of large numbers for $\tau$ in rational directions. Kesten and Zhang have proved the law of large numbers for $\tau$ and $\phi$ when the sides of the box are parallel to the coordinate hyperplanes: the two variables grow linearly with the surface $s$ of the basis of the box, with the same deterministic speed. We study the probabilities that the rescaled variables $\tau /s$ and $\phi /s$ are abnormally small. For $\tau$, the box can have any orientation, whereas for $\phi$, we require either that the box is sufficiently flat, or that its sides are parallel to the coordinate hyperplanes. We show that these probabilities decay exponentially fast with $s$, when $s$ grows to infinity. Moreover, we prove an associated large deviation principle of speed $s$ for $\tau /s$ and $\phi /s$, and we improve the conditions required to obtain the law of large numbers for these variables.Comment: 39 pages, 4 figures; improvement of the moment conditions and introduction of new results in the revised versio

The space of measured foliations of the hexagon

The theory of geometric structures on a surface with nonempty boundary can be developed by using a decomposition of such a surface into hexagons, in the same way as the theory of geometric structures on a surface without boundary is developed using the decomposition of such a surface into pairs of pants. The basic elements of the theory for surfaces with boundary include the study of measured foliations and of hyperbolic structures on hexagons. It turns out that there is an interesting space of measured foliations on a hexagon, which is equipped with a piecewise-linear structure (in fact, a natural cell-decomposition), and this space is a natural boundary for the space of hyperbolic structures with geodesic boundary and right angles on such a hexagon. In this paper, we describe these spaces and the related structures

Maximal stream and minimal cutset for first passage percolation through a domain of Rd\mathbb{R}^d

We consider the standard first passage percolation model in the rescaled graph $\mathbb{Z}^d/n$ for $d\geq2$ and a domain $\Omega$ of boundary $\Gamma$ in $\mathbb{R}^d$. Let $\Gamma ^1$ and $\Gamma ^2$ be two disjoint open subsets of $\Gamma$, representing the parts of $\Gamma$ through which some water can enter and escape from $\Omega$. A law of large numbers for the maximal flow from $\Gamma ^1$ to $\Gamma ^2$ in $\Omega$ is already known. In this paper we investigate the asymptotic behavior of a maximal stream and a minimal cutset. A maximal stream is a vector measure $\vec{\mu}_n^{\max}$ that describes how the maximal amount of fluid can cross $\Omega$. Under conditions on the regularity of the domain and on the law of the capacities of the edges, we prove that the sequence $(\vec{\mu}_n^{\max})_{n\geq1}$ converges a.s. to the set of the solutions of a continuous deterministic problem of maximal stream in an anisotropic network. A minimal cutset can been seen as the boundary of a set $E_n^{\min}$ that separates $\Gamma ^1$ from $\Gamma ^2$ in $\Omega$ and whose random capacity is minimal. Under the same conditions, we prove that the sequence $(E_n^{\min})_{n\geq1}$ converges toward the set of the solutions of a continuous deterministic problem of minimal cutset. We deduce from this a continuous deterministic max-flow min-cut theorem and a new proof of the law of large numbers for the maximal flow. This proof is more natural than the existing one, since it relies on the study of maximal streams and minimal cutsets, which are the pertinent objects to look at.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/13-AOP851 the Annals of Probability (http://www.imstat.org/aop/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org