Two-generator arithmetic Fuchsian groups

Abstract

In (12), Takeuchi characterized those Fuchsian groups which are arithmetic in terms of the traces of the matrices involved in the group. Further, he used these criteria (13) to show that there are only finitely many arithmetic Fuchsian triangle groups and indeed to determine the signatures of all such groups. We note that, if two Fuchsian triangle groups have the same signature, then they are conjugate in PGL(2, ) and hence either all Fuchsian triangle groups of a given signature are arithmetic or none of them are. This will not, in general, be the case for non-triangle Fuchsian groups and in this paper, we examine Fuchsian groups with signature of one of the forms (1; n; 0), n ≽ 2 or (0; 2,2, 2, n; 0), n ≽ 3 and odd in which case the space of conjugacy classes has dimension two. Our principal results state that for each n, there are only finitely many conjugacy classes of arithmetic Fuchsian groups of given signature (1; n; 0) or (0; 2, 2, 2, n; 0) and for large enough n there are no arithmetic Fuchsian groups of that given signature (Theorems 3 and 4). Together with the results of (13) and known results for non-cocompact Fuchsian groups, these results show that there are only finitely many conjugacy classes of two-generator arithmetic Fuchsian groups (see §7).