Intrinsic curvature flows can be used to design Riemannian metrics by prescribed curvatures. This chapter presents three discrete curvature flow methods that are recently introduced into the engineering fields: the discrete Ricci flow and discrete Yamabe flow for surfaces with various topology, and the discrete curvature flow for hyperbolic 3-manifolds with boundaries. For each flow, we introduce its theories in both the smooth setting and the discrete setting, plus the numerical algorithms to compute it. We also provide a brief survey on their history and their link to some of the engineering applications in computer graphics, computer vision, medical imaging, computer aided design and others.

Solving wave propagation problems within heterogeneous media has been of great interest and has a wide range of applications in physics and engineering. The design of numerical methods for such general wave propagation problems is challenging because the energy conserving property has to be incorporated in the numerical algorithms in order to minimize the phase or shape errors after long time integration. In this paper, we focus on multi-dimensional wave problems and consider linear second-order wave equation in heterogeneous media. We develop and analyze an LDG method, in which numerical fluxes are carefully designed to maintain the energy preserving property and accuracy. Compatible high order energy conserving time integrators are also proposed. The optimal error estimates and the energy conserving property are proved for the semi-discrete methods. Our numerical experiments demonstrate optimal rates of convergence, and show that the errors of the numerical solutions do not grow significantly in time due to the energy conserving property.

In this paper, we propose a structured bisection method with adaptive randomized sampling for finding selected or all of the eigenvalues of certain real symmetric matrices A. For A with a low-rank property, we construct a hierarchically semiseparable (HSS) approximation and show how to quickly evaluate and update its inertia in the bisection method. Unlike some existing randomized HSS constructions, the methods here do not require the knowledge of the off-diagonal (numerical) ranks in advance. Moreover, for A with a weak rank property or slowly decaying off-diagonal singular values, we show an idea for aggressive low-rank inertia evaluation, which means that a compact HSS approximation can preserve the inertia for certain shifts. This is analytically justified for a special case, and numerically shown for more general ones. A generalized LDL factorization of the HSS approximation is then designed for the fast evaluation of the inertia. A significant advantage over standard LDL factorizations is that the HSS LDL factorization (and thus the inertia) of A − sI can be quickly updated with multiple shifts s in bisection. The factorization with each new shift can reuse about 60% of the work. As an important application, the structured eigensolver can be applied to symmetric Toeplitz matrices, and the cost to find one eigenvalue is nearly linear in the order of the matrix. The numerical examples demonstrate the efficiency and the accuracy of our methods, especially the benefit of low-rank inertia evaluations. The ideas and methods can be potentially adapted to other HSS computations where shifts are involved and to more problems without a significant low-rank property.

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Two-dimensional interaction between two Taylor vortices is simulated systematically through solving the two-dimensional, unsteady compressible Navier-Stokes equations using a fifth order weighted essentially nonoscillatory finite difference scheme. The main purpose of this study is to reveal the mechanism of sound generation in two-dimensional interaction of two Taylor vortices. Based on an extensive parameter study on the evolution of the vorticity field, we classify the interaction of two Taylor vortices into four types. The first type is the interaction of two counter-rotating vortices with similar strengths. The second type is the interaction of two co-rotating vortices without merging. The third type is the merging of two co-rotating vortices. The fourth type is the interaction of two vortices with a large difference in their strengths or scales. The mechanism of sound generation is analyzed.