In 1976, the author (see the open problem section in [3]) asked the following question: if p is a function defined on i? 3, what is the condition on p so that there is a sphere in R3 whose mean curvature is given by p. There were important works by Treibergs-Wei [2] and others on this question. Recently in a lecture that I gave in the Chinese University of Hong Kong, I realized that my work with R. Schoen on the existence of black hole can be used to settle the prescribed mean curvature question for a large class of p.

We prove that the algebraicmultiplicity of a holomorphic vector field at an isolated singularity is invariant by topological equivalences which are differentiable at the singular point.

We consider closed orientable hypersurfaces in a wide class of warped product manifolds which include space forms, deSitter-Schwarzschild and Reissner-Nordstr\"{o}m manifolds. By using a new integral formula or Brendle's Heintze-Karcher type inequality, we present some new characterizations of umbilic hypersurfaces. These results can be viewed as generalizations of the classical Jellet-Liebmann theorem and the Alexandrov theorem in Euclidean space. In particular, Corollary 1.8 implies that the embeddedness condition in Theorem 2 of [Brendle-Eichmair, JDG. 2013] is not necessary.

In \cite{rigidity}, Luo introduced a $\psi_{\lambda}$ edge invariant which turns out to be a coordinate of the Teichm\"uller space of a surface with boundary. And he proved that for $\lambda \geq 0$, the image of the Teichm\"uller space under $\psi_{\lambda}$ edge invariant coordinate is an open cell. In this paper we verify his conjecture that for $\lambda<0$, the image of the Teichm\"uller space is a bounded convex polytope.

Continuing the program of [DS] and [U1], we introduce refinements of the Donaldson-Smith standard surface count which are designed to count nodal pseudoholomorphic curves and curves with a prescribed decomposition into reducible components. In cases where a corresponding analogue of the Gromov-Taubes invariant is easy to define, our invariants agree with those analogues. We also prove a vanishing result for some of the invariants that count nodal curves.