Uniqueness and universality of the Brownian map

Abstract

We consider a random planar map $M_{n}$ which is uniformly distributed over the class of all rooted $q$-angulations with $n$ faces. We let $\mathbf{m}_{n}$ be the vertex set of $M_{n}$, which is equipped with the graph distance $d_{\mathrm{gr}}$. Both when $q\geq4$ is an even integer and when $q=3$, there exists a positive constant $c_{q}$ such that the rescaled metric spaces $(\mathbf{m}_{n},c_{q}n^{-1/4}d_{\mathrm{gr}})$ converge in distribution in the Gromov–Hausdorff sense, toward a universal limit called the Brownian map. The particular case of triangulations solves a question of Schramm.