Riemann, Hurwitz, and branched covering spaces: an exposition in mathematics

Abstract

We will consider spaces with nice connectedness properties, and the groups that act on them in such a way that the topology is preserved; we consider looking at the symmetry groups of a surface of genus g. Restricting our view to nite groups, we will develop the concept of covering spaces and illustrate its usefulness to the study of these group actions by generalizing this development to the theory of branched coverings. This theory lets us develop the famous Riemann-Hurwitz Relation, which will in turn allow us to develop Hurwitz's Inequality, an upper bound on the order of a symmetry group of a given surface. We then follow Kulkarni and use the Riemann-Hurwitz Relation to construct a congruence relating the genus g of a surface to the cyclic deciencies of the symmetry groups that can act on it. These developments will then be applied to study a special case of branched coverings, those in which there is only one branch point, yielding a lower bound on the genus of both surfaces involved.