In brain mapping research, parameterized 3-D surface models are of great interest for statistical comparisons of anatomy, surface-based registration, and signal processing. Here, we introduce the theories of continuous and discrete surface Ricci flow, which can create Riemannian metrics on surfaces with arbitrary topologies with user-defined Gaussian curvatures. The resulting conformal parameterizations have no singularities and they are intrinsic and stable. First, we convert a cortical surface model into a multiple boundary surface by cutting along selected anatomical landmark curves. Secondly, we conformally parameterize each cortical surface to a parameter domain with a user-designed Gaussian curvature arrangement. In the parameter domain, a shape index based on conformal invariants is computed, and inter-subject cortical surface matching is performed by solving a constrained harmonic map. We

Let M be a closed surface diffeomorphic to S2 endowed with a Riemannian metric. Denote the diameter of M by d. We prove that for every x 2 M and every positive integer k there exist k distinct geodesic loops based at x of length  20kd.

In this paper we explicitly construct Moishezon twistor spaces on nCP2 for arbitrary n ≥ 2 which admit a holomorphic Caction. When n = 2, they coincide with Y. Poon’s twistor spaces. When n = 3, they coincide with the ones studied by the author in [14]. When n ≥ 4, they are new twistor spaces, to the best of the author’s knowledge. By investigating the anticanonical system, we show that our twistor spaces are bimeromorphic to conic bundles over certain rational surfaces. The latter surfaces can be regarded as orbit spaces of the C-action on the twistor spaces. Namely they are minitwistor spaces. We explicitly determine their defining equations in CP4. It turns out that the structure of the minitwistor space is independent of n. Further, we explicitly construct a CP2-bundle over the resolution of this surface, and provide an explicit defining equation of the conic bundles. It shows that the number of irreducible components of the discriminant locus for the conic bundles increases as n does. Thus our twistor spaces have a lot of similarities with the famous LeBrun twistor spaces, where the minitwistor space CP1 ×CP1 in LeBrun’s case is replaced by our minitwistor spaces found in [15].

There have been many attempts to define quasilocal energy/mass for a spacelike 2-surface in a spacetime by the Hamilton–Jacobi method. The main difficulty in this approach is the subtle choice of the background configuration to be subtracted from the physical Hamiltonian. Quasilocal mass should be positive for general surfaces, but on the other hand should be zero for surfaces in the flat spacetime. In this paper, we survey the work in a series of papers [6, 25–27] in which a new notion of quasilocal mass/energy–momentum is proposed and investigated. In particular, the notion of energy observed by a 'quasilocal observer' will be discussed.

Let $\sum$ be a minimal submanifold of $\mathbb{R}^{n+m}$ that can be represented as the graph of a smooth map $f : \mathbb{R}^n \to \mathbb{R}^m$. We apply a formula we derived in the study of mean curvature flow to obtain conditions under which $\sum$ must be an affine subspace. Our result covers all known ones in the general case. The conditions are stated in terms of the singular values of $df$.