We study the rigidity of polyhedral surfaces and the moduli space of polyhedral surfaces using variational principles. Curvaturelike quantities for polyhedral surfaces are introduced and are shown to determine the polyhedral metric up to isometry. The action functionals in the variational approaches are derived from the cosine law. They can be considered as 2-dimensional counterparts of the Schlaefli formula.

A time-flat condition on spacelike 2-surfaces in spacetime is considered here. This condition is analogous to constant torsion condition for curves in three dimensional space and has been studied in [2, 4, 5, 12, 13]. In particular, any 2-surface in a static slice of a static spacetime is time-flat. In this article, we address the question in the title and prove several local and global rigidity theorems for such surfaces in the Minkowski spacetime.

In this paper, we study some algebraic topology aspects of Stringc structures, more precisely, from the perspective of Whitehead tower and the perspective of the loop group of Spinc(n). We also extend the generalized Witten genera constructed for the first time by Chen et al. [J. Differential Geom. 88 (2011), pp. 1–40] to correspond to Stringc structures of various levels and give vanishing results for them.

In this paper we consider proper holomorphic embeddings of finitely connected planar domains into ℂ^{$n$}that approximate given proper embeddings on smooth curves. As a side result we obtain a tool for approximating a $\mathcal{C}^{\infty}$ diffeomorphism on a polynomially convex set in ℂ^{$n$}by an automorphism of ℂ^{$n$}that satisfies some additional properties along a real embedded curve.

Let $(X,\alpha)$ be a K\"ahler manifold of dimension $n$, and let $[\omega] \in H^{1,1}(X,\mathbb{R})$. We study the problem of specifying the Lagrangian phase of $\omega$ with respect to $\alpha$, which is described by the nonlinear elliptic equation \[ \sum_{i=1}^{n} \arctan(\la_i)= h(x) \] where $\la_i$ are the eigenvalues of $\omega$ with respect to $\alpha$. When $h(x)$ is a topological constant, this equation corresponds to the deformed Hermitian-Yang-Mills (dHYM) equation, and is related by Mirror Symmetry to the existence of special Lagrangian submanifolds of the mirror. We introduce a notion of subsolution for this equation, and prove a priori $C^{2,\beta}$ estimates when $|h|>(n-2)\frac{\pi}{2}$ and a subsolution exists. Using the method of continuity we show that the dHYM equation admits a smooth solution in the supercritical phase case, whenever a subsolution exists. Finally, we discover some stability-type cohomological obstructions to the existence of solutions to the dHYM equation and we conjecture that when these obstructions vanish the dHYM equation admits a solution. We confirm this conjecture for complex surfaces.