[Math] the “serious” name for the topograph (for a quadratic form)

gt.geometric-topologynt.number-theoryterminology

One way to study (mixed signature) quadratic forms in two variables is to study the topograph. Looks like the signature doesn't matter: here is (1,1) and (1-,1).

The name is derived from τοποσ (Greek: "place") and γραφή ("writing"). I read that if you're really good at reading topographs you can extract information like the genus, class number, solve the Pell equation, and more.

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There are two resources I found for topographs:

  • The Sensual Quadratic Form, John H Conway
  • Topology of Numbers, Allen Hatcher

They are basically drawing the dual tree of the Farey Tesselation, which is a tiling of $\mathbb{H}$ or $\mathbb{D}$ by hyperbolic triangles. Is there a more serious name for putting trees on $\mathbb{H}$?

This question emerges, for example, trying to draw these things with a computer and I needed to decide a natural place to put the interior vertices, and I couldn't think of one. The "outer" vertices are indexed by $\text{P}\mathbb{Q}^1$ and the interior vertices could be in any reasonable place.

There could be a serious name for this structure, like the Bruhat-Tits building or maybe it's in Serre's book on Trees. Any guidance?

enter image description here


A figure similar to the topograph also appears in a discussion of the Bruhat-Tits tree for $\text{SL}(2, \mathbb{Q}_2)$. [notes]

Best Answer

There's no more serious name for the topograph, as far as I know. And Conway puts a lot of thought into his names, so I think it's best to keep it. I think it's meant to fit into a larger metaphorical system with his rivers and lakes and climbing, which make it so pleasant to study binary quadratic forms. The "topograph" refers to the topographical map one uses for navigation, I believe.

Here's a description with some words in italics -- searching for these words might help you find better resources. The underlying geometry (forget about quadratic forms for a moment) is the $(\infty,3)$ tiling of the hyperbolic plane, i.e. the one with Schlafli symbol $\{ \infty,3 \}$. This is a tiling of the hyperbolic plane by apeirogons (infinity-gons), meeting three at a vertex. The incidence of these apeirogons, edges, and vertices is the Coxeter geometry associated to the Coxeter group of type $(\infty,3)$.

When drawing topographs on the computer, using the Poincare disk model of the hyperbolic plane, each apeirogon is inscribed in a horocycle. In the disk model, the horocycle appears as a circle. I think it looks good to place the face-labels at the (Euclidean) centers of these circles. One can find these centers easily enough by taking the centers of the Ford circles and mapping them by a Mobius transformation which sends the upper half-plane to the unit disk. I also like to scale the fonts via the hyperbolic metric.

Happy drawing... enter image description here

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