Quadrilateral Mesh Generation II : Meromorphic Quartic Differentials and Abel-Jacobi Condition

This work discovers the equivalence relation between quadrilateral meshes and meromorphic quartic differentials. Each quad-mesh induces a conformal structure of the surface, and a meromorphic quartic differential, where the configuration of singular vertices corresponds to the configurations of the poles and zeros (divisor) of the meromorphic differential. Due to Riemann surface theory, the configuration of singularities of a quad-mesh satisfies the Abel–Jacobi condition. Inversely, if a divisor satisfies the Abel–Jacobi condition, then there exists a meromorphic quartic differential whose divisor equals the given one. Furthermore, if the meromorphic quartic differential is with finite trajectories, then it also induces a quad-mesh, the poles and zeros of the meromorphic differential correspond to the singular vertices of the quad-mesh.