The face numbers of simplicial complexes without missing faces of dimension larger than$i$are studied. It is shown that among all such ($d$−1)-dimensional complexes with non-vanishing top homology, a certain polytopal sphere has the componentwise minimal$f$-vector; and moreover, among all such 2-Cohen–Macaulay (2-CM) complexes, the same sphere has the componentwise minimal$h$-vector. It is also verified that the$l$-skeleton of a flag ($d$−1)-dimensional 2-CM complex is 2($d$−$l$)-CM, while the$l$-skeleton of a flag piecewise linear ($d$−1)-sphere is 2($d$−$l$)-homotopy CM. In addition, tight lower bounds on the face numbers of 2-CM balanced complexes in terms of their dimension and the number of vertices are established.

The skeleton of a 2D shape is an important geometric structure in pattern analysis and computer vision. In this paper we study the skeleton of a 2D shape in a two-manifold M, based on a geodesic metric. We present a formal definition of the skeleton S(\Omega) for a shape V in M and show several properties that make S(\Omega) distinct from its Euclidean counterpart in R^2. We further prove that for a shape sequence {\Omega_i} that converge to a shape V in M, the mapping \Omega\rightarrow S(\Omega_i) is lower semi-continuous. A direct application of this result is that we can use a set P of sample points to approximate the boundary of a 2D shape V in M, and the Voronoi diagram of P inside \Omega\subset M gives a good approximation to the skeleton S(\Omega). Examples of skeleton computation in topography and brain morphometry are illustrated.

The purpose of this paper is to study the monodromy groups associated to the quasi-bounded holomorphic quadratic forms on punctured surfaces. As a consequence, we obtain a natural family of symplectic structures on the Teichm/iller space Tg,, for n> 0. As another consequence, we show that the projective monodromy map from a class of Fuchsian equations to the representation variety is generically a local diffeomorphism.

In this paper the centroaffine Minkowski problem, a critical case of the L p-Minkowski problem in the n+ 1 dimensional Euclidean space, is studied. By its variational structure and the method of blow-up analyses, we obtain two sufficient conditions for the existence of solutions, for a generalized rotationally symmetric case of the problem.

For a random walk on a finitely generated group G we obtain a generalization of a classical inequality of Ancona. We deduce as a corollary that the identity map on G extends to a continuous equivariant surjection from the Martin boundary to the Floyd boundary, with preimages of conical points being singletons. This provides new results for Martin compactifications of relatively hyperbolic groups.