This goal of the paper is to show that the automorphisms of the complex of curves in a surface are induced by the self-homeomorphisms of the surface except the surface is the 2-holed torus.

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.

Finding surface mappings with least distortion arises from many applications in various fields. Extremal Teichm ller maps are surface mappings with least conformality distortion. The existence and uniqueness of the extremal Teichm ller map between Riemann surfaces of finite type are theoretically guaranteed [1]. Recently, a simple iterative algorithm for computing the Teichm ller maps between connected Riemann surfaces with given boundary value was proposed in [11]. Numerical results was reported in the paper to show the effectiveness of the algorithm. The method was successfully applied to landmark-matching registration. The purpose of this paper is to prove the iterative algorithm proposed in [11] indeed converges.

Given a loop on a surface, its homotopy class can be specified as a word consisting of letters representing the homotopy group generators. One of the interesting problems is how to compute the shortest word for a given loop. This is an NP-hard problem in general. However, for a closed surface that allows a hyperbolic metric and is equipped with a canonical set of fundamental group generators, the shortest word problem can be reduced to finding the shortest loop that is homotopic to the given loop, which can be solved efficiently. In this paper, we propose an efficient algorithm to compute the shortest words for loops given on triangulated surface meshes. The design of this algorithm is inspired and guided by the work of Dehn and BirmanSeries. In support of the shortest word algorithm, we also propose efficient algorithms to compute shortest paths and shortest loops under hyperbolic metrics using a novel

Registration, which aims to find an optimal 1-1 correspondence between shapes, is an important process in different research areas. Conformal mappings have been widely used to obtain a diffeomorphism between shapes that minimizes angular distortion. Conformal registrations are beneficial since it preserves the local geometry well. However, when landmark constraints are enforced, conformal mappings generally do not exist. This motivates us to look for a unique landmark matching quasi-conformal registration, which minimizes the conformality distortion. Under suitable condition on the landmark constraints, a unique diffeomporphism, called the Teichmller extremal mapping between two surfaces can be obtained, which minimizes the maximal conformality distortion. In this paper, we propose an efficient iterative algorithm, called the Quasi-conformal (QC) iterations, to compute the Teichmller mapping. The basic idea is to represent the set of diffeomorphisms using Beltrami coefficients (BCs), and look for an optimal BC associated to the desired Teichmller mapping. The associated diffeomorphism can be efficiently reconstructed from the optimal BC using the Linear Beltrami Solver (LBS). Using BCs to represent diffeomorphisms guarantees the diffeomorphic property of the registration. Using our proposed method, the Teichmller mapping can be accurately and efficiently computed within 10 seconds. The obtained registration is guaranteed to be bijective. The proposed algorithm can also be extended to compute Teichmller mapping with soft landmark constraints. We applied the proposed algorithm to real applications, such as brain