The object of this note is to study the regular coverings of the closed orientable surface of genus 2.

Let the closed orientable surface Fh of genus h be a covering of F2 and let and f be the fundamental groups respectively. Then is a subgroup of f of index n = h − 1. A covering is called regular if is normal in f.

Conversely, let be a normal subgroup of f of finite index. Then there is a uniquely determined regular covering Fh such that is the fundamental group of Fh. The covering Fh is an orientable surface. Since the index n of in f is supposed to be finite, Fh is closed, and its genus is given by n = h − 1.

The fundamental group f can be defined by

.

Let σ1(n) denote the sum of the tth powers of the divisors of n, σ(n) = σ1(n). Also place

where γ is Euler's constant, ζ(s) is the Riemann ζ-function and x ≧ 2. The function Δ(x) is the remainder term arising in the divisor problem for σ((m, n)). Cesàro proved originally [1], [6, p. 328] that Δ(x) = o(x2 log x). More recently in I [2, (3.14)] it was shown by elementary methods that . This estimate was later improved to in II [3, (3.7)]. In the present paper (§ 3) we obtain a much more substantial reduction in the order of Δ(x), by showing that Δ(x) can be expressed in terms of the remainder term in the classical Dirichlet divisor problem. On the basis of well known results for this problem, it follows easily that . The precise statement of the result for σ((m, n)) is contained in (3.2).

Let

It is familiar that

(1) In the addition theorem [3, p. 363]

where

take θ = π and replace v by v−½. Since

we get

In this note we consider measures on a left coset space G/H, where G is a locally compact group and H is a closed subgroup. We assume the natural topology in G/H and we denote the generic element of this space by xH (x∈G). Every element t∈G defines a homeomorphism of G/H given by t(xH) = (tx)H. A. Weil showed that a Baire measure on G/H invariant under all these homeomorphisms can exist only if

Δ(ξ) = δ(ξ) for each ξ ∈ H,

where Δ(x), δ(ξ) denote the modular functions in G, H [6, pp. 42–45]. We shall devote our investigations to inherited measures on G/H (cf. [3] and the definition below) invariant under homeomorphisms belonging to a normal and closed subgroup T ⊂ G.

Let Rn denote real Euclidean space of n dimensions. If

define , and (as usual) so that, by the inequality of arithmetic and geometric means,

Let Λ0 be the integer lattice, consisting of those points in Rn whose co-ordinates are integers. A non-singular n × n matrix M will be called a Minkowski matrix, if, for any point a ∈ Rn, there exists a point x ∈ Λ0 such that

It was shown by Minkowski that, when n = 2, every non-singular matrix is a Minkowski matrix, and that, for general n, every rational non-singular matrix is a Minkowski matrix. Minkowski is also said to have conjectured that every non-singular matrix is a Minkowski matrix, whatever the value of n. For n = 3, this was proved by Remak [5], and a much simpler proof was given later by Davenport [2]. For n = 4, it was proved by Dyson [3], who used a method similar to that of Remak and Davenport, but required the methods of algebraic topology to deal with some of the complications which arise in the higher dimension. Since this method depends also on the reduction of quadratic forms, it is quite likely that it might fail for higher values of n even if the topological difficulties could be overcome. Therefore, an alternative proof for n = 3, due to Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer [1], is of some interest, though in this dimension it is more complicated than Davenport's proof. A good deal of their analysis applies to general n, and they showed that for all n there is a neighbourhood of the unit matrix I that consists entirely of Minkowski matrices.

By a theorem of Hurwitz [3], an algebraic curve of genus g ≧ 2 cannot have more than 84(g − l) birational self-transformations, or, as we shall call them, automorphisms. The bound is attained for Klein's quartic

of genus 3 [4]. In studying the problem whether there are any other curves for which the bound is attained, I was led to consider the universal covering space of the Riemann surface, which, as Siegel observed, relates Hurwitz's theorem to Siegel's own result [7] on the measure of the fundamental region of Fuchsian groups. Any curve with 84(g − 1) automorphisms must be uniformized by a normal subgroup of the triangle group (2, 3, 7), and, by a closer analysis of possible finite factor groups of (2, 3, 7), purely algebraic methods yield an infinite family of curves with the maximum number of automorphisms. This will be shown in a later paper.