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A cooriented circle immersion into the plane can be extended to a stable map of the disk which is an immersion in a neighborhood of the boundary and with outward normal vector field along the boundary equal to the given coorienting normal vector field. We express the minimal number of fold components of such a stable map as a function of its number of cusps and of the normal degree of its boundary. We also show that this minimum is attained for any cooriented circle immersion of normal degree not equal to one.

In this note we propose a generalization of heterotic/F-theory duality. We introduce a set of non-compact building blocks which we glue together to reach compact examples of generalized duality pairs. The F-theory building blocks consist of non-compact elliptically fibered Calabi-Yau fourfolds which also admit a K3 fibration. The compact elliptic model obtained by gluing need not have a globally defined K3 fibration. By replacing the K3 fiber of each F-theory building block with a T2, we reach building blocks in a heterotic dual vacuum which includes a position dependent dilaton and three-form flux. These building blocks are glued together to reach a heterotic flux background. We argue that in these vacua, the gauge fields of the heterotic string become localized, and remain dynamical even when gravity decouples. This enables a heterotic dual for the hyperflux GUT breaking mechanism which has recently figured prominently in F-theory GUT models. We illustrate our general proposal with some explicit examples.

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