Thurston's genericity conjecture for pseudo-Anosov mapping classes

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Let Σ\Sigma be a surface, let MCG⁡(Σ)\operatorname{MCG}(\Sigma) denote its mapping class group, and let SS be a finite generating set for MCG⁡(Σ)\operatorname{MCG}(\Sigma). Write dSd_S for the corresponding word metric and let ee be the identity. Thurston's genericity conjecture. The proportion of pseudo-Anosov mapping classes in the word-metric ball of radius kk tends to 11:

#{g∈MCG⁡(Σ):g is pseudo-Anosov and dS(e,g)≤k}#{g∈MCG⁡(Σ):dS(e,g)≤k}⟶1.\frac{\#\{g \in \operatorname{MCG}(\Sigma): g \text{ is pseudo-Anosov and } d_S(e,g) \leq k\}}{\# \{g \in \operatorname{MCG}(\Sigma): d_S(e,g) \leq k\}} \longrightarrow 1.

This conjecture predicts that pseudo-Anosov mapping classes are exponentially generic, and is a long-standing conjecture attributed to Thurston and collected by Farb. Its status is not resolved in the supplied source.

References

Primary source

Lihuang Ding, Dídac Martínez-Granado and Abdul Zalloum, “Growth tightness and genericity for word metrics from injective spaces”, arXiv:2407.02378 (2025).

Additional references

2 papers in this index state this conjecture (2013–2024). The statement above is taken from the most recent of them; the others are arXiv:1306.3757.

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