This paper is about a type of quantitative density of closed geodesics and orthogeodesics on complete finite-area hyperbolic surfaces. The main results are upper bounds on the length of the shortest closed geodesic and the shortest doubly truncated orthogeodesic that are $\varepsilon$-dense on a given compact set on the surface.

We give a finitary criterion for the convergence of measures on non-elementary geometrically finite hyperbolic orbifolds to the unique measure of maximal entropy. We give an entropy criterion controlling escape of mass to the cusps of the orbifold. Using this criterion, we prove new results on the distribution of collections of closed geodesics on such an orbifold, and as a corollary, we prove the equidistribution of closed geodesics up to a certain length in amenable regular covers of geometrically finite orbifolds.

Given a closed geodesic on a compact arithmetic hyperbolic surface, we show the existence of a sequence of Laplacian eigenfunctions whose integrals along the geodesic exhibit nontrivial growth. Via Waldspurger’s formula we deduce a lower bound for central values of Rankin-Selberg L-functions of Maass forms times theta series associated to real quadratic fields.

Let $f\in C^{2}(\mathbb{T}^{2})$ have mean value 0 and consider

$$\begin{eqnarray}\sup _{\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FE}\,\text{closed geodesic}}\frac{1}{|\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FE}|}\biggl|\int _{\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FE}}f\,d{\mathcal{H}}^{1}\biggr|,\end{eqnarray}$$

$\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FE}$

$\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FE}:\mathbb{S}^{1}\rightarrow \mathbb{T}^{2}$

$|\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FE}|$

$\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FE}$

$s\geq 2$

$$\begin{eqnarray}|\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FE}|^{s}{\lesssim}_{s}\biggl(\max _{|\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FC}|=s}\Vert \unicode[STIX]{x2202}_{\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FC}}f\Vert _{L^{1}(\mathbb{T}^{2})}\biggr)\Vert \unicode[STIX]{x1D6FB}f\Vert _{L^{2}}\Vert f\Vert _{L^{2}}^{-2}.\end{eqnarray}$$

We prove an implicit function theorem for functions on infinite-dimensional Banach manifolds, invariant under the (local) action of a finite-dimensional Lie group. Motivated by some geometric variational problems, we consider group actions that are not necessarily differentiable everywhere, but only on some dense subset. Applications are discussed in the context of harmonic maps, closed (pseudo-) Riemannian geodesics and constant mean curvature hypersurfaces.

The field contains the infinite sequence of uniformly bounded continued fractions and similar patterns can be found in for any d>0. This paper studies the broader structure underlying these patterns, and develops related results and conjectures for closed geodesics on arithmetic manifolds, packing constants of ideals, class numbers and heights.