Finding the Birman-Series set

Abstract

By a celebrated result of Birman and Series, the set of simple complete geodesics form a nowhere dense subset of a hyperbolic surface. We show that a segment of finite length is in a (small) neighborhood of this set if it can be "extended simply" in both directions for long enough. We deduce that, for large enough genus $g$, there exist surfaces with a Birman-Series set that is roughly $\frac{1}{g^{\sfrac{2}{3}}}$-dense.