We introduce a new geometric flow, called the chord shortening flow, which is the negative gradient flow for the length functional on the space of chords with end points lying on a fixed submanifold in Euclidean space. As an application, we give a simplified proof of a classical theorem of Lusternik and Schnirelmann (and a generalization by Riede and Hayashi) on the existence of multiple orthogonal geodesic chords. For a compact convex planar domain, we show that any convex chord not orthogonal to the boundary would shrink to a point in finite time under the flow.

No abstract uploaded!

No abstract uploaded!

A discrete conformality for polyhedral metrics on surfaces is introduced in this paper which generalizes earlier work on the subject. It is shown that each polyhedral metric on a surface is discrete conformal to a constant curvature polyhedral metric which is unique up to scaling. Furthermore, the constant curvature metric can be found using a discrete Yamabe flow with surgery.

We study minimal graphic functions on complete Riemannian manifolds $\Sigma$ with non-negative Ricci curvature, Euclidean volume growth and quadratic curvature decay. We derive global bounds for the gradients for minimal graphic functions of linear growth only on one side. Then we can obtain a Liouville type theorem with such growth via splitting for tangent cones of $\Sigma$ at infinity. When, in contrast, we do not impose any growth restrictions for minimal graphic functions, we also obtain a Liouville type theorem under a certain non-radial Ricci curvature decay condition on $\Sigma$. In particular, the borderline for the Ricci curvature decay is sharp by our example in the last section.