We show that solutions of Thurston's equation on triangulated 3-manifolds in a commutative ring carry topological information. We also introduce a homogeneous Thurston's equation and a commutative ring associated to triangulated 3-manifolds. It is shown that solutions to homogeneous equations over the real numbers are critical points of an entropy function.

In this paper, we produce an elementary approach to Thurston's theory of measured laminations on compact surfaces with non-empty boundary. We show that the theory can be derived from a simple inequality for geometric intersection numbers between arcs inside an octagon.

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This paper is devoted to finding the highest possible focus order of planar polynomial differential equations. The results consist of two parts: (i) we explicitly construct a class of concrete systems of degree n, where n+1 is a prime p or a power of a prime p^k, and show that these systems can have a focus order n^2-n; (ii) we theoretically prove the existence of polynomial systems of degree n having a focus order n^2-1 for any even number n. Corresponding results for odd n and more concrete examples having higher focus orders are given too.

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