In 1960s, Almgren initiated a program to find minimal hypersurfaces in compact manifolds using min-max method. This program was largely advanced by Pitts and Schoen-Simon in 1980s when the manifold has no boundary. In this paper, we finish this program for general compact manifold with nonempty boundary. As a result, we prove the existence of a smooth embedded minimal hypersurface with free boundary in any compact smooth Euclidean domain. An application of our general existence result combined with the work of Marques and Neves shows that for any compact Riemannian manifolds with nonnegative Ricci curvature and convex boundary, there exist infinitely many embedded minimal hypersurfaces with free boundary which are properly embedded.

We introduce a quantum trace map for an ideally triangulated hyperbolic knot complement S^3∖K. The map assigns a quantum operator to each element of Kauffmann Skein module of the 3-manifold. The quantum operator lives in a module generated by products of quantized edge parameters of the ideal triangulation modulo some equivalence relations determined by gluing equations. Combining the quantum map with a state-integral model of SL(2,C) Chern-Simons theory, one can define perturbative invariants of knot K in the knot complement whose leading part is determined by its complex hyperbolic length. We then conjecture that the perturbative invariants determine an asymptotic expansion of the Jones polynomial for a link composed of K and K. We propose the explicit quantum trace map for figure-eight knot complement and confirm the length conjecture up to the second order in the asymptotic expansion both numerically and analytically.

The Gauss-Bonnet theorem and the Cohn-Vossen inequality show that the only complete surface with positive curvature is either the sphere, RP2, or the plane. In higher dimension, the curvature tensor is far more complicated. There are several commonly used partial components of the curvature tensor that had been studied for the whole century. The simplest one is the scalar curvature which is the average of all curvatures at one point. It appeared in the Hilbert action for general relativity. This was studied extensively in connection with general relativity.

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We introduce a semi-algebraic structure on the set of all isotopy classes of non-separating simple closed curves in any compact oriented surface and show that the structure is finitely generated. As a consequence, we produce a natural finite dimensional linear representation of the mapping class group of the surface. Applications to the Teichmller space, Thurston's measured lamination space, the harmonic Beltrami differentials, and the first cohomology groups of the surface are discussed.