Describing conformal maps in terms of a complex functional equation.

65 Views Asked by At

Conformal maps have the interesting property that they map circles and points to points and circle.

I wonder if the only holomorphic functions with this property are conformal maps. But I realized I don’t know any way to write “mapping lines and circles to lines and circles” as a functional equation which can then be solved or approximated for a collection of functions (which would in principle be the conformal maps).

1

There are 1 best solutions below

0
On

The answer is that the functions that take lines and circles to lines and circles are precisely the Möbius transformations

$$f(z) = \dfrac{az+b}{cz+d},\quad \text{with} \ \ ad-bc\neq0.$$

I began writing an outline of the proof, but then I found this pdf, which is reasonably self-contained and goes into far more detail than I was willing to type here:

http://www.maths.qmul.ac.uk/~sb/CA_sectionIVnotes.pdf