A Lambert quadrilateral with acute angle and sides incident to the opposite right-angle vertex satisfies the displayed relation. Reflect four copies around that vertex to make a symmetric hyperbolic quadrilateral whose four corner angles are . Identifying opposite sides yields a torus with one cone angle . The two central axis loops have lengths and meet once at right angles. Cutting along one loop gives a pair of pants with two equal geodesic boundaries and the cone point; reglue the boundaries with a Fenchel–Nielsen twist to obtain the two-parameter cone-torus family. Its seven-sheeted torsion-free covers have genus four.
Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2004 iii Paper 18 4 Solution Created 2026-10-03 Updated 2026-10-14
Put , of order . It acts on the seven points and seven lines of the Fano plane. Take to be a point stabilizer and to be a line stabilizer; both have index seven and order twenty-four. The fact that point and hyperplane stabilizers are almost conjugate follows by comparing fixed-point counts: for a matrix , the numbers of fixed nonzero vectors and fixed nonzero covectors are bothbecause and its transpose have the same rank, and the dual action has the same fixed space as . Over , nonzero vectors represent points and nonzero covectors represent lines without any further scalar quotient. The two permutation characters therefore agree. The coset-character formulathen proves Gassmann equivalence. They are not conjugate: a point stabilizer has orbits of sizes one and six on points and hence preserves no three-point line. Its conjugates are again point stabilizers, whereas preserves its line. The point and line stabilizers form the required nonconjugate Gassmann pair.
We construct a family using the Lambert quadrilateral construction of a cone torus. Let . We use the elementary hyperbolic tri-rectangle fact that a quadrilateral with three right angles, remaining angle , and side lengths adjacent to the right-angle vertex opposite exists uniquely forHere are the sides at the opposite right-angle corner, not the sides incident to . Given any , choose . Reflect four copies around the opposite right-angle vertex. The result is a symmetric hyperbolic quadrilateral with all four corner angles and opposite sides of equal lengths. Pair opposite sides by the axis translations. The quotient is an oriented torus with one cone point, whose total angle is . Its two central axis loops are embedded closed geodesics, of lengths , intersecting once at right angles.
Cut this cone torus along . The result is a hyperbolic pair of pants with two geodesic boundaries of length and the cone point. Reglue those equal boundaries with a Fenchel–Nielsen twist . This gives a two-parameter family , with the same cone angle, and marked simple classes meeting once. Near any zero-twist member their geodesic representatives remain embedded, transverse and disjoint from the cone point. The length of remains , and the right-angle matrix product givesFor example, the zero-twist holonomies are and ; multiply the latter by to obtain the twist formula. Their commutator has trace , confirming exact elliptic order seven. The side-pairing construction supplies discreteness; the trace computation alone would not do so.
The orbifold fundamental group isSend to the supplied generator and to . Their commutator has order seven, so this defines an epimorphism . Its kernel avoids all nontrivial cone stabilizers, which are conjugates of powers of ; therefore it is torsion-free. It defines a smooth closed regular hyperbolic cover with deck group . The subgroups , of order twenty-four, also avoid every order-seven cone stabilizer. Thusare smooth closed seven-sheeted covers of the cone torus. The orbifold Euler characteristic is , givingEquivalently there is one preimage of the cone point, with local degree seven, and its lifted angle is . The Sunada theorem, in the free-subgroup-action form proved above, makes and isospectral for every parameter.
Nonisometry requires further work. A cycle of length in the monodromy permutation of a simple base geodesic gives a primitive simple lifted geodesic of length times the base length. From the supplied action, each cover has one lift of of length and two of length . From the supplied action, each has one lift of of each length . Let be the unique two-cycle lift of , and let be the two three-cycle lifts of . The fact that cycle intersections count intersections of lifted curves gives their intersection numbers: the seven crossings above the one base crossing are labelled by the sheets, so a crossing belongs to both lifted components exactly when its sheet lies in both cycles. ConsequentlyIndeed, in the first cover the two three-cycles have supports and the two-cycle has support ; in the second they have supports and . The lifted curves intersect only over the single base crossing, so these are actual intersection counts of the geodesics, not merely abstract sheet-incidence numbers.
To make this a test against every isometry, we must identify these curves intrinsically, rather than require the isometry to respect the covering map. We use generic isolation of lifted simple geodesics, and give the needed genericity argument. Lengths of closed geodesics are real-analytic functions of the cone-torus length and twist parameters. For a primitive hyperbolic class and an integer , consider the equalitiesApart from or , none is an identity on the full two-parameter family. To see this for the first equality, pinch the simple curve while keeping the cone angle fixed. The collar lemma makes every class crossing long. A class disjoint from lies in the cut pair of pants; its limiting holonomy has positive translation length unless it is a power of one of the new cusp loops, which are conjugate to in the torus group. Cone-peripheral classes are elliptic and do not represent closed geodesics. Thus the only primitive class with length tending to zero in this degeneration is , up to inversion and conjugacy. This excludes an identity with a positive multiple of . Pinching proves the corresponding assertion for . The argument uses the usual hyperbolic collar and cusp degeneration facts, obtainable by the right-angle quadrilateral formulas; the cone angle remains fixed. Analytic continuation on the connected length-twist parameter space shows that the same identities cannot hold on a small open neighbourhood of a zero-twist member.
There are countably many class equations, and each nontrivial real-analytic equation has a closed zero set with empty interior. The Baire category theorem therefore gives a parameter in that small neighbourhood at which both target lengths are attained only by the prescribed lift components. This isolation persists on a smaller open neighbourhood. Indeed, near a fixed compact hyperbolic metric there are uniformly only finitely many primitive geodesic classes below a fixed length bound, by discreteness of the covering group and a compact fundamental region; nearby metrics are uniformly bilipschitz. Only finitely many classes can therefore approach the two fixed finite target lengths. Their strict inequalities persist under a sufficiently small parameter change.
Now keep and let vary in a sufficiently small interval around . For each , the only primitive geodesics of length in either cover are the two components, and the only primitive geodesic of length is . An isometry would have to preserve these length classes and their intersection-count multiset, contradicting . Henceis an interval-parametrized family of isospectral nonisometric hyperbolic Riemann surfaces of genus four. Shrink again so a small length window around contains only those two components for every parameter. Their common length varies strictly, so members at distinct parameters cannot all be the same surface in different markings. The spectra agree within each pair; this construction does not assert a nontrivial continuously isospectral deformation of one hyperbolic surface.