For two nearby disjoint coassociative submanifolds C and C′ in a G2-manifold, we construct thin instantons with boundaries lying on C and C′ from regular J-holomorphic curves in C. We explain their relationship with the Seiberg-Witten invariants for C.

Many years ago, SY Cheng, P. Li and myself [1] gave an estimate of the heat kernel for the Laplacian. This was later improved by P. Li and myself in [2]. The key point of this later paper was a parabolic Harnack inequality that generalized an elliptic Harnack inequality that I developed more than twenty years ago.

This paper investigates several global rigidity issues for polyhedral surfaces including inversive distance circle packings. Inversive distance circle packings are polyhedral surfaces introduced by P Bowers and K Stephenson in [Mem. Amer. Math. Soc. 170, no. 805, Amer. Math. Soc.(2004)] as a generalization of Andreev and Thurstons circle packing. They conjectured that inversive distance circle packings are rigid. We prove this conjecture using recent work of R Guo [Trans. Amer. Math. Soc. 363 (2011) 47574776] on the variational principle associated to the inversive distance circle packing. We also show that each polyhedral metric on a triangulated surface is determined by various discrete curvatures that we introduced in [arXiv 0612.5714], verifying a conjecture in [arXiv 0612.5714]. As a consequence, we show that the discrete Laplacian operator determines a spherical polyhedral metric.

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Let M be a compact n-dimensional Riemannian manifold with nonnegative Ricci curvature and mean convex boundary ∂M. Assume that the mean curvature H of the boundary ∂M satisfies H≥(n−1)k>0 for some positive constant k. In this paper, we prove that the distance function d to the boundary ∂M is bounded from above by 1/𝑘 and the upper bound is achieved if and only if M is isometric to an n-dimensional Euclidean ball of radius 1/𝑘.