On the number of coverings of the sphere ramified over given points

Boris Bychkov

Published 2013-12-04, updated 2014-03-27Version 2

We present the generating function for the numbers of isomorphism classes of coverings of the two-dimensional sphere by the genus $g$ compact oriented surface not ramified outside of a given set of $m+1$ points in the target, fixed ramification type over one point, and arbitrary ramification types over the remaining $m$ points. We present the genus expansion of this generating function and prove, that the generating function of coverings of genus $0$ satisfies some system of differential equations. We show that this generating function is a specialization of the function from paper \cite{GJ} and, therefore, satisfies the KP-hierarchy.