This is a commentary on Teichmüller's paper Ein Verschiebungssatz der quasikonformen Abbildung (A displacement theorem of quasiconformal mapping), published in 1944. We explain in detail how Teichmüller solves the problem of finding the quasiconformal mapping from the unit disc to itself, sending 0 to a strictly negative point on the real line, holding the boundary of the disc pointwise fixed and with the smallest quasiconformal dilatation. We mention also some consequences of this extremal problem and we ask a question.
PreliminariesAll along this paper, we shall be interested in planar quasiconformal mappings. Unless otherwise noted, all domains that we consider are connected subsets of the Riemann sphere C := C ∪ {∞}. There are several books which deal with quasiconformal mappings, see e.g. [5], [17] or [8].We give below two equivalent definitions of quasiconformal maps. Both of them are interesting and they introduce notions (module and quasiconformal dilatation) that Teichmüller used to solve Problem 1.1.A quadrilateral Q is a Jordan domain (i.e. a simply connected domain whose boundary is a Jordan curve) with four distinct boundary points. Sometimes, we will denote by Q (a, b, c, d) such a quadrilateral, where a, b, c and d are boundary points and we shall usually assume that these four points appear on the boundary in that order. By applying successively the Riemann Mapping Theorem, the Carathéodory Theorem 3 and a suitable Schwarz-Christoffel mapping, we know that Q is conformally equivalent (i.e. there exists a holomorphic bijection) to a rectangle 3 The theorem referred to is known as the boundary correspondance theorem.