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We continue our study of the chemical (graph) distance inside large critical percolation clusters in dimension two. We prove new estimates, which involve the three-arm probability, for the point-to-surface and point-to-point distances. We show that the point-to-point distance in Z 2 between two points in the same critical percolation cluster has infinite second moment. We also give quantitative versions of our previous results comparing the length of the shortest crossing to that of the lowest crossing of a box.

We prove the nonexistence of stable immersed minimal surfaces uniformly conformally equivalent to $ \mathbb{C}$ in any complete orientable four-dimensional Riemannian manifold with uniformly positive isotropic curvature. We also generalize the same nonexistence result to higher dimensions provided that the ambient manifold has uniformly positive complex sectional curvature. The proof consists of two parts: assuming an ``eigenvalue condition'' on the $ \overline {\partial }$-operator of a holomorphic bundle, we prove (1) a vanishing theorem for these holomorphic bundles on $ \mathbb{C}$ and (2) an existence theorem for holomorphic sections with controlled growth by Hörmander's weighted $L^2$-method.

We present a multivariate version of Hidden Field Equations (HFE) over a finite field of odd characteristic, with an extra "embedding'' modifier. Combining these known ideas makes our new MPKC (multivariate public key cryptosystem) more efficient and scalable than any other extant multivariate encryption scheme. Switching to odd characteristics in HFE-like schemes affects how an attacker can make use of field equations. Extensive empirical tests (using MAGMA-2.14, the best commercially available \mathbold{F_4} implementation) suggests that our new construction is indeed secure against algebraic attacks using Gröbner Basis algorithms. The "embedding'' serves both to narrow down choices of pre-images and to guard against a possible Kipnis-Shamir type (rank-based) attack. We may hence reasonably argue that for practical sizes, prior attacks take exponential time. We demonstrate that our construction is in fact efficient by implementing practical-sized examples of our "odd-char HFE'' with 3 variables (`"THFE'') over GF(31). To be precise, our preliminary THFE implementation is 15x--20x the speed of RSA-1024.