A Note on Planarity Stratification of Hurwitz Spaces

Abstract

AbstractOne can easily show that any meromorphic function on a complex closed Riemann surface can be represented as a composition of a birational map of this surface to ℂℙ2and a projection of the image curve froman appropriate pointp∊ ℂℙ2to the pencil of lines throughp. We introduce a natural stratiûcation of Hurwitz spaces according to the minimal degree of a plane curve such that a given meromorphic function can be represented in the above way and calculate the dimensions of these strata. We observe that they are closely related to a family of Severi varieties studied earlier by J. Harris, Z. Ran, and I. Tyomkin.