“Le Groupe Fondamental de la Droite Projective Moins Trois Points” is now online

The three papers that influenced me the most at the beginning of my mathematical career were “Rational Isogenies of Prime Degree,” by my advisor, Barry Mazur; Serre’s “Sur les représentations modulaires de degré 2 de ;” and Deligne’s 200-page monograph on the fundamental group of the projective line minus three points.  The year after I got my Ph.D. I used to carry around a battered Xerox of this paper wherever I went, together with a notebook in which I recorded my confusions, questions, and insights about what I was reading.  This was the paper where I learned what a motive was, or at least some of the things a motive should be; where I first encountered the idea of a Tannakian category; where I first learned the definition of a Hodge structure, and what was meant by “periods.” Most importantly, I learned Deligne’s philosophy about the fundamental group:  that the grand questions proposed by Grothendieck in the “Esquisse d’un Programme” regarding the action of Gal(Q) on the etale fundamental group were simply beyond our current reach, but that the nilpotent completion of — which seems like only a tiny, tentative step into the non-abelian world! — nonetheless contains a huge amount of arithmetic information.  My favorite contemporary manifestation of this philosophy is Minhyong Kim’s remarkable work on non-abelian Chabauty.

Anyway:  Deligne’s article appears in the MSRI volume Galois Groups over Q, which is long out of print; I bought a copy at MSRI in 1999 and I don’t know anyone who’s gotten their hands on one since.  Kirsten Wickelgren, a young master of the nilpotent fundamental group, asked me the obvious-in-retrospect question of whether it was possible to get Deligne’s article back in print.  I talked to MSRI about this and it turns out that, since Springer owns the copyright, the book can’t be reprinted; but Deligne himself is allowed to make a scan of the article available on his personal web page.  Deligne graciously agreed:  and now, here it is, a publicly available .pdf scan of “Le Groupe Fondamental de la Droite Projective Moins Trois Points.”

Enjoy!

Koberda on dilatation and finite nilpotent covers

One reason dilatation was on my mind was thanks to a very interesting recent paper by Thomas Koberda, a Ph.D. student of Curt McMullen at Harvard.

Recall from the previous post that if f is a pseudo-Anosov mapping class on a surface Σ, there is an invariant λ of f called the dilatation, which measures the “complexity” of f; it is a real algebraic number greater than 1.  By the spectral radius of f we mean the largest absolute value of an eigenvalue of the linear automorphism of induced by f.  Then the spectral radius of f is a lower bound for λ(f), and in fact so is the spectral radius of f on any finite etale cover of Σ preserved by f.

This naturally leads to the following question, which appears as Question 1.2 in Koberda’s paper:

Is λ(f) the supremum of the spectral radii of f on Σ’, as Σ’ ranges over finite etale covers of Σ preserved by f?

It’s easiest to think about variation in spectral radius when Σ’ ranges over abelian covers.  In this case, it turns out that the spectral radii are very far from determining the dilatation.  When Σ is a punctured sphere, for instance, a remark in a paper of Band and Boyland implies that the supremum of the spectral radii over finite abelian covers is strictly smaller than λ(f), except for the rare cases where the dilatation is realized on the double cover branched at the punctures.   It gets worse:  there are pseudo-Anosov mapping classes which act trivially on the homology of every finite abelian cover of Σ, so that the supremum can be 1!  (For punctured spheres, this is equivalent to the statement that the Burau representation isn’t faithful.)  Koberda shows that this unpleasant state of affairs is remedied by passing to a slightly larger class of finite covers:

Theorem (Koberda) If f is a pseudo-Anosov mapping class, there is a finite nilpotent etale cover of Σ preserved by f on whose homology f acts nontrivially.

Furthermore, Koberda gets a very nice purely homological version of the Nielsen-Thurston classification of diffeomorphisms (his Theorem 1.4,) and dares to ask whether the dilatation might actually be the supremum of the spectral radius over nilpotent covers.  I have to admit I would find that pretty surprising!  But I don’t have a good reason for that feeling.