Discrete surfaces with length and area and minimal fillings of the circle.

Abstract: We propose to imagine that every Riemannian metric on a surface is discrete at the small scale, made of curves called walls. The length of a curve is its number of crossings with the walls, and the area of the surface is the number of crossings between the walls themselves. We show how to approximate a Riemannian or self-reverse Finsler metric by a wallsystem.
This work is motivated by Gromov's filling area conjecture (FAC) that the hemisphere has minimum area among orientable Riemannian surfaces that fill isometrically a closed curve of given length. (A surface fills its boundary curve isometrically if the distance between each pair of boundary points measured along the surface is not less than the distance measured along the boundary.) We introduce a discrete FAC: every square-celled surface that fills isometrically a 2n-cycle graph has at least n(n-1)/2 squares. This conjecture is equivalent to the FAC extended to surfaces with self-reverse Finsler metric.
If the surface is a disk, the discrete FAC follows from Steinitz's algorithm for transforming curves into pseudolines. This gives a new, combinatorial proof that the FAC holds for disks with Riemannian or self-reverse Finsler metric.
If time allows, we also discuss how to discretize a directed metric on a surface using a triangulation with directed edges. The length of each edge is 1 in one way and 0 in the other way, and the area of the surface is the number of triangles. These discrete surfaces are dual to Postnikov's plabic graphs.