Grothendieck's theory of Dessins d'Enfants involves combinatorially determined affine, reflective, and conformal structures on compact surfaces. In this paper the authors establish the first general method for uniformizing these dessin surfaces and for approximating their associated Belyĭ meromorphic functions.

The paper begins by developing a discrete theory of dessins based on circle packing. This theory is surprisingly faithful, even at its coarsest stages, to the geometry of the classical theory, and it displays some new sources of richness; in particular, algrebraic number fields enter the theory in a new way. Furthermore, the discrete dessin structures converge to their classical counterparts under a hexagonal refinement scheme. Since the discrete objects are computable, circle packing provides opportunities both for routine experimentation and for large scale explicit computation, as illustrated by a variety of dessin examples up to genus 4 which are computed and displayed.

The paper goes on to discuss uses of discrete conformal geometry with triangulations arising in other situations, such as conformal tilings and discrete meromorphic functions. It concludes by addressing technical and implementation issues and open mathematical questions that they raise.