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We study the rigidity of polyhedral surfaces using variational principles. The action functionals are derived from the cosine laws. The main focus of this paper is on the cosine law for a nontriangular region bounded by three possibly disjoint geodesics. Several of these cosine laws were first discovered and used by Fenchel and Nielsen. By studying the derivative of the cosine laws, we discover a uniform approach to several variational principles on polyhedral surfaces with or without boundary. As a consequence, the work of Penner, Bobenko and Springborn and Thurston on rigidity of polyhedral surfaces and circle patterns are extended to a very general context.

The notion of a generalized CRF-structure on a smooth manifold was recently introduced and studied by Vaisman (2008)[6]. An important class of generalized CRF-structures on an odd dimensional manifold M consists of CRF-structures having complementary frames of the form , where is a vector field and is a 1-form on M with ()= 1. It turns out that these kinds of CRF-structures give rise to a special class of what we called strong generalized contact structures in Poon and Wade [5]. More precisely, we show that to any CRF-structures with complementary frames of the form , there corresponds a canonical Lie bialgebroid. Finally, we explain the relationship between generalized contact structures and another generalization of the notion of a CauchyRiemann structure on a manifold.

We characterize conformally flat spaces as the only compact self-dual manifolds which are U(1)-equivariantly and conformally decomposable into two complete self-dual Einstein manifolds with common conformal infinity. A geometric characterization of such conformally flat spaces is also given.