A short note on short pants

Abstract

It is a theorem of Bers that any closed hyperbolic surface admits a pants decomposition consisting of curves of bounded length where the bound only depends on the topology of the surface. The question of the quantification of the optimal constants has been well studied and the best upper bounds to date are linear in genus, a theorem of Buser and Sepp\"al\"a. The goal of this note is to give a short proof of an linear upper bound which slightly improves the best known bounds.