In this paper we study surfaces in$R$^{3}that arise as limit shapes in random surface models related to planar dimers. These limit shapes are$surface tension minimizers$, that is, they minimize a functional of the form ∫$σ$(∇$h$)$dx$$dy$among all Lipschitz functions$h$taking given values on the boundary of the domain. The surface tension$σ$has singularities and is not strictly convex, which leads to formation of$facets$and$edges$in the limit shapes.

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We investigate whether a Stein manifold$M$which allows proper holomorphic embedding into ℂ^{$n$}can be embedded in such a way that the image contains a given discrete set of points and in addition follow arbitrarily close to prescribed tangent directions in a neighbourhood of the discrete set. The infinitesimal version was proven by Forstnerič to be always possible. We give a general positive answer if the dimension of$M$is smaller than$n$/2 and construct counterexamples for all other dimensional relations. The obstruction we use in these examples is a certain hyperbolicity condition.

In this paper, we develop and analyze the Runge-Kutta discontinuous Galerkin (RKDG) method to solve weakly coupled hyperbolic multi-domain problems. Such problems involve transfer type boundary conditions with discontinuous fluxes between different domains, calling for special techniques to prove stability of the RKDG methods. We prove both stability and error estimates for our RKDG methods on simple models, and then apply them to a biological cell proliferation model \cite{EMSC}. Numerical results are provided to illustrate the good behavior of our RKDG methods.

We prove several rigidity theorems for elliptic genera associated to Toeplitz operators on odd dimensional spin manifolds. We also prove an equivariant odd index theorem for Dirac operators with involution parity and the Atiyah-Hirzebruch vanishing theorems for odd dimensional spin manifolds.