Hurwitz equivalence of braid monodromies and extremal elliptic surfaces

Abstract

We discuss the equivalence between the categories of certain ribbon graphs and subgroups of the modular group $\Gamma$ and use it to construct exponentially large families of not Hurwitz equivalent simple braid monodromy factorizations of the same element. As an application, we also obtain exponentially large families of {\it topologically} distinct algebraic objects such as extremal elliptic surfaces, real trigonal curves, and real elliptic surfaces.