New extremal properties for constructing conformal mappings

Summary It is well known that for a given simply connected regionR containing zero the uniform norm attains its minimum in the class of all holomorphic functions normalized byf(0)=0 andf(0)=1 only for the conformal mappingfRD(r)={z|z|}. It is shown that this theorem is still valid if one replaces the ordinary modulus | | on by any other norm on . For instance it is possible to obtain direct mappings ofR onto parallelograms, rectangles and ellipses. For the special norms |₁ and | this leads to a simple and fast computational technique involving linear programming methods. Several numerical examples are given.