There is a well-known opposition, about the ethics of belief, between the "Victorian" position heralded by Clifford's famous maxim:"It is wrong, always, everywhere, and for everyone, to believe anything on insufficient evidence", and the so-called "pragmatist" view put forward by William James in his essay "The Will to Believe", according to which believing may be under the control of the will,...

1. Teichmuller was the first to bring out the important role played by quadratic differentials in extremal problems in the theory of functions. He indicated [3] the behavior in the small of certain important curves associated with them. It remained for Schaeffer and Spencer [2, Chap. Ill] to carry out this study in full detail. While they speak explicitly only of hyperelliptic differentials, th...

Article history: Received 17 May 2009 Available online 19 January 2011 Communicated by Gilles Schaeffer