The chapter discusses the group actions on R³. The Smith conjecture has many equivalent forms, and each of these forms has various consequences and generalizations. The Smith conjecture is a structure theorem about symmetries of the product of a compact surface with an interval. Here the interval may be closed or open. The usual Smith conjecture is equivalent to proving the smooth <i>Z_n</i> actions on <i>S</i>² [0, 1] are conjugate to actions that preserve the product structure. This generalized Smith conjecture represents the belief that all the symmetries of the product of a compact surface with an interval actually arise from the symmetries of the surface extended trivially to the product structure. The chapter presents how to apply minimal surfaces to study the generalized Smith conjecture on <i>S</i>² <i>I</i>, where <i>I</i> is an open or closed interval. A geodesic version of the loop theorem and a new equivariant

Ricci flow deforms the Riemannian metric proportionally to the curvature, such that the curvature evolves according to a heat diffusion process and eventually becomes constant everywhere. Ricci flow has demonstrated its great potential by solving various problems in many fields, which can be hardly handled by alternative methods so far.

In this article, we estimate the quasi-local energy with reference to the Minkowski spacetime (Wang and Yau in Phys Rev Lett 102 (2): 021101, 2009; Commun Math Phys 288 (3): 919942, 2009), the anti-de Sitter spacetime (Chen et al. in Commun Anal Geom, 2016. arXiv: 1603.02975), or the Schwarzschild spacetime (Chen et al. in Adv Theor Math Phys 22 (1): 123, 2018). In each case, the reference spacetime admits a conformal KillingYano 2-form which facilitates the application of the Minkowski formula in Wang et al.(J Differ Geom 105 (2): 249290, 2017) to estimate the quasi-local energy. As a consequence of the positive mass theorems in Liu and Yau (J Am Math Soc 19 (1): 181204, 2006) and Shi and Tam (Class Quantum Gravity 24 (9): 23572366, 2007) and the above estimate, we obtain rigidity theorems which characterize the Minkowski spacetime and the hyperbolic space.

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Unit tangent bundle of a surface carries various information of tangent vector fields on that surface. For 2-spheres (ie genus-zero closed surfaces), the unit tangent bundle is a closed 3-manifold that has non-trivial topology and cannot be embedded in R3. Therefore it cannot be constructed by existing mesh generation algorithms directly. This work aims at the first discrete construction of unit tangent bundles over 2-spheres using tetrahedral meshes. We propose a two-stage algorithm for the construction, which starts from constructing two local bundles and then combines them into a global bundle.