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Given a hyperbolic surface with geodesic boundary S, the lengths of a maximal system of disjoint simple geodesic arcs on S that start and end at @S perpendicularly are coordinates on the Teichm¨uller space T (S). We express the Weil-Petersson Poisson structure of T (S) in this system of coordinates, and we prove that it limits pointwise to the piecewise-linear Poisson structure defined by Kontsevich on the arc complex of S. At the same time, we obtain a formula for the first-order variation of the distance between two closed geodesics under Fenchel-Nielsen deformation.

This paper develops a novel computational technique to define and construct manifold splines with only one singular point by employing the rigorous mathematical theory of Ricci flow. The central idea and new computational paradigm of manifold splines are to systematically extend the algorithmic pipeline of spline surface construction from any planar domain to an arbitrary topology. As a result, manifold splines can unify planar spline representations as their special cases. Despite its earlier success, the existing manifold spline framework is plagued by the topology-dependent, large number of singular points (ie,| 2 g 2| for any genus-g surface), where the analysis of surface behaviors such as continuity remains extremely difficult. The unique theoretical contribution of this paper is that we devise new mathematical tools so that manifold splines can now be constructed with only one singular point, reaching their

In relativity, the energy of a moving particle depends on the observer, and the rest mass is the minimal energy seen among all observers. The Wang–Yau quasi-local mass for a surface in spacetime introduced in Wang and Yau (Phys Rev Lett 102(2):021101, 2009 ; Commun Math Phys 288(3):919–942, 2009) is defined by minimizing quasi-local energy associated with admissible isometric embeddings of the surface into the Minkowski space. A critical point of the quasi-local energy is an isometric embedding satisfying the Euler–Lagrange equation. In this article, we prove results regarding both local and global minimizing properties of critical points of the Wang–Yau quasi-local energy. In particular, under a condition on the mean curvature vector we show a critical point minimizes the quasi-local energy locally. The same condition also implies that the critical point is globally minimizing among all axially symmetric embedding provided the image of the associated isometric embedding lies in a totally geodesic Euclidean 3-space.

We prove that the number of critical points of a Li–Tam Green’s function on a complete open Riemannian surface of finite type admits a topological upper bound, given by the first Betti number of the surface. In higher dimensions, we show that there are no topological upper bounds on the number of critical points by constructing, for each nonnegative integer N, a Riemannian manifold diffeomorphic to Rn (n > 3) whose minimal Green’s function has at least N non-degenerate critical points. Variations on the method of proof of the latter result yield contractible n-manifolds whose minimal Green’s functions have level sets diffeomorphic to any fixed codimension 1 compact submanifold of R^n.