Random Hyperbolic Surfaces Via Flat Geometry

Mirzakhani gave an inductive procedure to build random hyperbolic surfaces by gluing together smaller random pieces along curves. She proved that as the length of the gluing curve grows, these families equidistribute in the moduli space of hyperbolic surfaces. In this talk, I’ll explain how the conjugacy (exposited in James’s talk) between the earthquake and horocycle flows provides a template for translating equidistribution results for flat surfaces into equidistribution results for hyperbolic ones. Using this correspondence, we address Mirzakhani’s twist torus conjecture and exhibit new limiting distributions for hyperbolic surfaces built out of symmetric pieces. This is joint work (in progress) with James Farre.