In 1960s, Almgren initiated a program to find minimal hypersurfaces in compact manifolds using min-max method. This program was largely advanced by Pitts and Schoen-Simon in 1980s when the manifold has no boundary. In this paper, we finish this program for general compact manifold with nonempty boundary. As a result, we prove the existence of a smooth embedded minimal hypersurface with free boundary in any compact smooth Euclidean domain. An application of our general existence result combined with the work of Marques and Neves shows that for any compact Riemannian manifolds with nonnegative Ricci curvature and convex boundary, there exist infinitely many embedded minimal hypersurfaces with free boundary which are properly embedded.

The classical Minkowski formula is extended to spacelike codimension-two submanifolds in spacetimes which admit "hidden symmetry" from conformal Killing-Yano two-forms. As an application, we obtain an Alexandrov type theorem for spacelike codimension-two submanifolds in a static spherically symmetric spacetime: a codimension-two submanifold with constant normalized null expansion (null mean curvature) must lie in a shear-free (umbilical) null hypersurface. These results are generalized for higher order curvature invariants. In particular, the notion of mixed higher order mean curvature is introduced to highlight the special null geometry of the submanifold. Finally, Alexandrov type theorems are established for spacelike submanifolds with constant mixed higher order mean curvature, which are generalizations of hypersurfaces of constant Weingarten curvature in the Euclidean space.

In this paper we show by example that there is no uniform estimate for the L p-Minkowski problem. As a result we obtain the nonuniqueness of solutions to the problem.

We give a finite presentation for the braid twist group of a decorated surface. If the decorated surface arises from a triangulated marked surface without punctures, we obtain a finite presentation for the spherical twist group of the associated 3-Calabi–Yau triangulated category. The motivation/application is that the result will be used to show that the (principal component of) space of stability conditions on the 3-Calabi–Yau category is simply connected in the sequel [King and Qiu, Invent. Math., to appear].

Kaimanovich (2003) [9] introduced the concept of augmented tree on the symbolic space of a selfsimilar set. It is hyperbolic in the sense of Gromov, and it was shown by Lau and Wang (2009) [12] that under the open set condition, a self-similar set can be identified with the hyperbolic boundary of the tree. In the paper, we investigate in detail a class of simple augmented trees and the Lipschitz equivalence of such trees. The main purpose is to use this to study the Lipschitz equivalence problem of the totally disconnected self-similar sets which has been undergoing some extensive development recently.