Many natural real-valued functions of closed curves are known to extend continuously to the larger space of geodesic currents. For instance, the extension of length with respect to a fixed hyperbolic metric was a motivating example for the development of geodesic currents. We give a simple criterion on a curve function that guarantees a continuous extension to geodesic currents. The main condition of our criterion is the smoothing property, which has played a role in the study of systoles of translation lengths for Anosov representations. It is easy to see that our criterion is satisfied for almost all known examples of continuous functions on geodesic currents, such as nonpositively curved lengths or stable lengths for surface groups, while also applying to new examples like extremal length. We use this extension to obtain a new curve counting result for extremal length.

For holomorphic functions $f$ in the unit disk $ \mathbb{D} $ with $f(0)= 0$, we prove a modulus growth bound involving the logarithmic capacity (transfinite diameter) of the image. We show that the pertinent extremal functions map the unit disk conformally onto the interior of an ellipse. We prove a modulus growth bound for elliptically schlicht functions in terms of the elliptic capacity ${\mathrm{d} }_{\mathrm{e} } f( \mathbb{D} )$ of the image. We also show that the function ${\mathrm{d} }_{\mathrm{e} } f(r \mathbb{D} )/ r$ is increasing for $0\lt r\lt 1$.

We construct global solutions of the minimal surface equation over certain smooth annular domains and over the domain exterior to certain smooth simple closed curves. Each resulting minimal graph has an isolated jump discontinuity on the inner boundary component which, at least in some cases, is shown to have nonvanishing curvature.