Linear bound for the length of a conjugating element in the mapping class group
by
Jing Tao
University of Illinois at Chicago

Given two conjugate mapping classes f and g, we produce a conjugating element w such that |w| ≤ K (|f| + |g|), where |·| denotes the word metric with respect to a fixed generating set, and K is a constant depending only on the generating set. As a consequence, the conjugacy problem for mapping class groups is exponentially bounded.

Date received: March 21, 2009