The convergence of inversive distance circle packings to the Riemann mapping

Abstract

Bowers and Stephenson introduced the notion of inversive distance circle packings as a natural generalization of Thurston's circle packings. They further conjectured that discrete conformal maps induced by inversive distance circle packings converge to the Riemann mapping. In this paper, we prove Bowers-Stephenson's conjecture for Jordan domains by establishing a solvability theorem of certain prescribing combinatorial curvature problems for inversive distance circle packings.