A variational formula for the Lutwak affine surface areas j of convex bodies in Rn is established when 1 ≤ j ≤ n − 1. By using introduced new ellipsoids associated with projection functions of convex bodies, we prove a sharp isoperimetric inequality for j , which opens up a new passage to attack the longstanding Lutwak conjecture in convex geometry.

We prove two mixed versions of the Discrete Nodal Theorem of Davies et. al.[3] for bounded degree graphs, and for three-connected graphs of fixed genus g . Using this we can show that for a three-connected graph satisfying a certain volume-growth condition, the multiplicity of the g th Laplacian eigenvalue is at most $2\left [

As> iVinf^ b^ where dx denotes the degree of the vertex x. In particular, we derive lower bounds of eigenvalues for convex subgraphs which consist of lattice points in an d-dimensional Riemannian manifolds M with convex boundary. The techniques involve both the (discrete) heat kernels of graphs and improved estimates of the (continuous) heat kernels of Riemannian manifolds. We prove eigenvalue lower bounds for convex subgraphs of the form ce2/(dD (M)) 2 where e denotes the distance between two closest lattice points, D (M) denotes the diameter of the manifold M and c is a constant (independent of the dimension d and the number of vertices in 5, but depending on the how" dense" the lattice points are). This eigenvalue bound is useful for bounding the rates of convergence for various random walk problems. Since many enumeration problems can be approximated by considering random walks in convex subgraphs of some appropriate host graph, the eigenvalue inequalities here have many applications.

Let (V, E) denote a graph with vertex set V= V (T) and edge set E= E (). Suppose a group TL acts on V such that:(i) for all g Ti,{gu, gv} GE if and only if {u, v} E,(ii) for any two vertices and v, there is a g T such that guv. Then we say is a homogeneous graph with the associated group Ti. In other words, is vertex-transitive under the action of Ti and We can identify V with the coset space Ti/X where X={g E Ti: gvv}, for a fixed vertex v, denotes the isotropy group. We note that the Cayley graph is a special case of homogeneous graphs with X trivial. The edge set of a homogeneous graph can be described by an (edge) generating set ii H such that each edge of is of the form {v, gv} for some v V, and g . In this paper we require the generating set to be symmetric, ie, g if and only if g^ 1 K. We say that a homogeneous graph is invariant if for every vertex a K, we have aKa-1= K.

In this paper, we are concerned with upper bounds of eigenvalues of Laplace operator on compact Riemannian manifolds and finite graphs. While on the former the Laplace operator is generated by the Riemannian metric, on the latter it reflects combinatorial structure of a graph. Respectively, eigenvalues have many applications in geometry as well as in combinatorics and in other fields of mathematics. We develop a universal approach to upper bounds on both continuous and discrete structures based upon certain properties of the corresponding heat kernel. This approach is perhaps much more general than its realization here. Basically, we start with the following entries:(1) an underlying space M with a finite measure+;(2) a well-defined Laplace operator 2 on functions on M so that 2 is a self-adjoint operator in L2 (M,+) with a discrete spectrum;(3) if M has a boundary, then the boundary condition should be chosen so that it does not disrupt self-adjointness of 2 and is of dissipative nature;(4) a distance function dist (x, y) on M so that|{dist| 1 for an appropriate notion of gradient.