Counting surface branched covers

To a branched cover f between orientable surfaces one can associate a certain branch datum, that encodes the combinatorics of the cover. This satisfies a compatibility condition called the Riemann-Hurwitz relation. The old but still partly unsolved Hurwitz problem asks whether for a given abstract compatible branch datum there exists a branched cover f such that . One can actually refine this problem and ask how many these f's exist, but one must of course decide what restrictions one puts on such f’s, and choose an equivalence relation up to which one regards them. As it turns out, quite a few natural choices for this relation are possible. In this short note we carefully analyze all these choices and show that the number of actually distinct ones is only three. To see that these three choices are indeed different from each other we employ Grothendieck's dessins d'enfant.

SOLUTION OF THE HURWITZ PROBLEM FOR LAURENT POLYNOMIALS

We investigate the following existence problem for rational functions: for a given collection Π of partitions of a number n to define whether there exists a rational function f of degree n for which Π is the branch datum. An important particular case when the answer is known is the one when the collection Π contains a partition consisting of a single element (in this case, the corresponding rational function is equivalent to a polynomial). In this paper, we provide a solution in the case when Π contains a partition consisting of two elements.