Timeline for Mapping Class Groups of Punctured Surfaces (and maybe Billiards)

8 events

when toggle format	what		by	license	comment
Dec 30, 2009 at 0:39	vote	accept	john mangual
Dec 24, 2009 at 19:28	answer	added	Dmitri Panov		timeline score: 4
Dec 22, 2009 at 22:19	comment	added	john mangual		OK, so when we talk about mapping class groups, there's usually an action going on. In my case, that's probably the action on the orbits of the billiard flow or on the moduli space of translation surfaces itself. Let me think about this a bit more...
Dec 22, 2009 at 21:15	answer	added	JSE		timeline score: 5
Dec 22, 2009 at 12:36	history	edited	Sam Nead		edited tags
Dec 22, 2009 at 3:13	comment	added	Ryan Budney		If your standard for concrete is $SL(2, \mathbb Z)$ you might not like the kinds of answers you get for other mapping class groups. :) Usually people come to understand mapping class groups by their actions on things -- Teichmuller space, the space of curves in the surface (curve complexes), etc. If all you care about is elements of the mapping class group up to conjugacy, a nice way to study them is by the surface bundles over a circle you can form using the mapping as monodromy.
Dec 22, 2009 at 3:07	answer	added	Andy Putman		timeline score: 25
Dec 22, 2009 at 1:58	history	asked	john mangual	CC BY-SA 2.5