Shortest paths in arbitrary plane domains

Abstract

Abstract Let $\Omega $ be a connected open set in the plane and $\gamma : [0,1] \to \overline {\Omega }$ a path such that $\gamma ((0,1)) \subset \Omega $ . We show that the path $\gamma $ can be “pulled tight” to a unique shortest path which is homotopic to $\gamma $ , via a homotopy h with endpoints fixed whose intermediate paths $h_t$ , for $t \in [0,1)$ , satisfy $h_t((0,1)) \subset \Omega $ . We prove this result even in the case when there is no path of finite Euclidean length homotopic to $\gamma $ under such a homotopy. For this purpose, we offer three other natural, equivalent notions of a “shortest” path. This work generalizes previous results for simply connected domains with simple closed curve boundaries.