The Mirzakhani function on the moduli space of a surface
In her famous doctoral work, Maryam Mirzakhani studied the asymptotics of the lengths of multicurves in a hyperbolic surface $X$. These asymptotics are controlled by two constants. The first one depends only on the topological type of the surface and of the multicurves considered. The second constant $\mu(X)$ depends on the hyperbolic metric of $X$, and is defined as the Thurston volume of the set of measured geodesic laminations of length at most $1$. I will discuss properties of $\mu(X)$ as a function on the moduli space of hyperbolic metrics on a given surface. The emphasis will be on the case of the one-punctured torus, as well as on experimental data and pretty pictures. This is joint work with Sabrina Enriquez, then an undergraduate at USC.