We propose a finite-dimensional variational principle on triangulated 3-manifolds so that its critical points are related to solutions to Thurstons gluing equation and Hakens normal surface equation. The action functional is the volume.

In this paper, we are concerned with the one-species VlasovPoissonBoltzmann system with a nonconstant background density in full space. There exists a stationary solution when the background density is a small perturbation of a positive constant state. We prove the nonlinear stability of solutions to the Cauchy problem near the stationary state in some Sobolev space without any time derivatives. This result is nontrivial even when the background density is a constant state. In the proof, the macroscopic balance laws are essentially used to deal with the a priori estimates on both the microscopic and macroscopic parts of the solution. Moreover, some interactive energy functionals are introduced to overcome difficulty stemming from the absence of time derivatives in the energy functional.

In this article, the authors cryptanalyze a k-out-of-n oblivious transfer protocol proposed in [12]. Their protocol is one of the most efficient k-out-of-n oblivious transfer protocols and is directly built from a 1-out-of-n oblivious transfer protocol. However, their analysis shows that the proposed k-out-of-n oblivious transfer protocol is insecure, though the primitive 1-out-of-n oblivious transfer protocol is secure. The weakness is that with high probability the receiver in their protocol can get all n secret messages encrypted by the sender. Finally, they fix the serious flaw and introduce an improved k-out-of-n oblivious transfer protocol without increasing any cost.

In relativity, the energy of a moving particle depends on the observer, and the rest mass is the minimal energy seen among all observers. The Wang–Yau quasi-local mass for a surface in spacetime introduced in Wang and Yau (Phys Rev Lett 102(2):021101, 2009 ; Commun Math Phys 288(3):919–942, 2009) is defined by minimizing quasi-local energy associated with admissible isometric embeddings of the surface into the Minkowski space. A critical point of the quasi-local energy is an isometric embedding satisfying the Euler–Lagrange equation. In this article, we prove results regarding both local and global minimizing properties of critical points of the Wang–Yau quasi-local energy. In particular, under a condition on the mean curvature vector we show a critical point minimizes the quasi-local energy locally. The same condition also implies that the critical point is globally minimizing among all axially symmetric embedding provided the image of the associated isometric embedding lies in a totally geodesic Euclidean 3-space.

The mean curvature flow is the gradient flow of volume functionals on the space of submanifolds. We prove a fundamental regularity result of the mean curvature flow in this paper: a Lipschitz submanifold with small local Lipschitz norm becomes smooth instantly along the mean curvature flow. This generalizes the regularity theorem of Ecker and Huisken for Lipschitz hypersurfaces. In particular, any submanifold of the Euclidean space with a continuous induced metric can be smoothed out by the mean curvature flow. The smallness assumption is necessary in the higher codimension case in view of an example of Lawson and Osserman. The stationary phase of the mean curvature flow corresponds to minimal submanifolds. Our result thus generalizes Morrey’s classical theorem on the smoothness of $C_1$ minimal submanifolds.