For fixed subgroups Fix(ϕ) of automorphisms ϕ on hyperbolic 3-manifold groups π1(M), we observed that rk(Fix(ϕ))<2rk(π1(M)) and the constant 2 in the inequality is sharp; we also classify all possible groups Fix(ϕ).

We establish the second part of Milnor's conjecture on the volume of simplexes in hyperbolic and spherical spaces. A characterization of the closure of the space of the angle Gram matrices of simplexes is also obtained.

We show that the hyperbolic structure on a closed, orientable, hyperbolic 3-manifold can be constructed from a solution to the hyperbolic gluing equations using any triangulation with essential edges. The key ingredients in the proof are Thurston's spinning construction and a volume rigidity result attributed by Dunfield to Thurston, Gromov and Goldman. As an application, we show that this gives a new algorithm to detect hyperbolic structures and small Seifert fibred structures on closed 3-manifolds.

We study the rigidity of polyhedral surfaces and the moduli space of polyhedral surfaces using variational principles. Curvature-like 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.

We show that solutions of Thurston's equation on triangulated 3-manifolds in a commutative ring carry topological information. We also introduce a homogeneous Thurston's equation and a commutative ring associated to triangulated 3-manifolds. It is shown that solutions to homogeneous equations over the real numbers are critical points of an entropy function.