Simple-homotopy for cell complexes is a special type of topological homotopy constructed by elementary collapses and elementary expansions. In this paper, we introduce graph homotopy for graphs and Graham homotopy for hypergraphs and study the relation between the two homotopies and the simple-homotopy for cell complexes. The graph homotopy is useful to describe topological properties of discretized geometric figures, while the Graham homotopy is essential to characterize acyclic hypergraphs and acyclic relational database schemes.

Given a closed strictly convex hypersurface M in the Euclidean space I?"+*, the Gauss map of M defines a homeomorphism between M and the unit sphere S". Therefore the Gauss-Kronecker curvature of M can be transplanted via the Gauss map to a function defined on S". If this function is denoted by K, then Minkowski observed that K must satisfy the equation where xi are the coordinate functions on S". Minkowski then asked the converse of the problem. Namely, given a positive function K defined on S" satisfying the above integral conditions, can we find a closed strictly convex hypersurface whose curvature function is given by K? Minkowski solved the problem in the category of polyhedrons. Then AD Alexandrov and others solved the problem in general. However, this last solution does not provide any information about the regularity of the (unique) convex hypersurface even if we assume K is smooth. In the two

The Lp dual curvature measure was introduced by Lutwak, Yang & Zhang in an attempt to unify the Lp Brunn– Minkowski theory and the dual Brunn–Minkowski theory. The characterization problem for Lp dual curvature measure, called the Lp dual Minkowski problem, is a fundamental problem in this unifying theory. The Lp dual Minkowski problem contains the Lp Minkowski problem and the dual Minkowski problem, two major problems in modern convex geometry that remain open in general. In this paper, existence results on the Lp dual Minkowski problem in the weak sense will be provided. Moreover, existence and uniqueness of the solution in the smooth category will also be demonstrated.

In this paper, we consider the L p dual Minkowski problem by geometric variational method. Using anisotropic Gauss–Kronecker curvature flows, we establish the existence of smooth solutions of the L p dual Minkowski problem when pq ≥ 0 and the given data is even. If f ≡ 1, we show under some restrictions on p and q that the only even, smooth, uniformly convex solution is the unit ball.

A discrete conformality for polyhedral metrics on surfaces is introduced in this paper. It is shown that each polyhedral metric on a compact surface is discrete conformal to a constant curvature polyhedral metric which is unique up to scaling. Furthermore, the constant curvature metric can be found using a finite dimensional variational principle.