Shortening all the simple closed geodesics on surfaces with boundary

Abstract

We give a proof of an unpublished result of Thurston showing that given any hyperbolic metric on a surface of finite type with nonempty boundary, there exists another hyperbolic metric on the same surface for which the lengths of all simple closed geodesics are shorter. (This is not possible for surfaces of finite type with empty boundary.) Furthermore, we show that we can do the shortening in such a way that it is bounded below by a positive constant. This improves a recent result obtained by Parlier in [2]. We include this result in a discussion of the weak metric theory of the Teichmüller space of surfaces with nonempty boundary.

Revised version, to appear in the Proceedings of the AMS