Harm Voskuil, Mumford curves, discontinuous groups and coverings of the projective line

Abstract. The first hour of the talk will consist of a brief introduction to rigid analytic geometry. Furthermore, the p-adic upper halfplane and Mumford curves will be discussed. In the second part of the talk, the structure of discontinuous groups acting on the p-adic upper halfplane and Galois coverings of the projective line by Mumford curves will be treated. In particular, the relation between the structure of the discontinuous group and the number of branch points of the covering map will be discussed. (this is joint work with M. van der Put).