Two Dehn surgeries on a knot are called purely cosmetic, if they yield manifolds that are homeomorphic as oriented manifolds. Suppose there exist purely cosmetic surgeries on a knot in S^3, we show that the two surgery slopes must be the opposite of each other. One ingredient of our proof is a Dehn surgery formula for correction terms in Heegaard Floer homology.

In this paper we investigate the one-dimensional hyperbolic mean curvature flow for closed plane curves. More precisely, we consider a family of closed curves S 1[0, T) 2 which satisfies the following evolution equation 2 F t 2 (u, t)= k (u, t) N(u, t)- (u, t),(u, t) S 1[0, T) with the initial data F (u, 0)= F 0 (u) a n d F t (u, 0)= f (u) N 0, where k is the mean curvature and is the unit inner normal vector of the plane curve F (u, t), f (u) and are the initial velocity and the unit inner normal vector of the initial convex closed curve Fo, respectively, and is given by ( 2 F s t, F t) T, in which stands for the unit tangent vector. The above problem is an initial value problem for a system of partial differential equations for F, it can be completely reduced to an initial value problem for a single partial differential equation for its support function. The latter equation is a hyperbolic Monge-Ampere

In this paper, we solve a Monge-Ampre-type equation by the continuity method. This equation is motivated by the superstring theory.

Computing uniformization maps for surfaces has been a challenging problem and has many practical applications. In this paper, we provide a theoretically rigorous algorithm to compute such maps via combinatorial Calabi flow for vertex scaling of polyhedral metrics on surfaces, which is an analogue of the combinatorial Yamabe flow introduced by Luo (Commun Contemp Math 6(5):765–780, 2004). To handle the singularies along the combinatorial Calabi flow, we do surgery on the flow by flipping. Using the discrete conformal theory established in Gu et al. (J Differ Geom 109(3):431–466, 2018; J Differ Geom 109(2):223–256, 2018), we prove that for any initial Euclidean or hyperbolic polyhedral metric on a closed surface, the combinatorial Calabi flow with surgery exists for all time and converges exponentially fast after finite number of surgeries. The convergence is independent of the combinatorial structure of the initial triangulation on the surface.

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.