This note briefly reviews the {\it Mirror Principle} as developed in the series of papers \LLYI\LLYII\LLYIII\LLYIV\LCHY. We illustrate this theory with a few new examples. One of them gives an intriguing connection to a problem of counting holomorphic disks and annuli. This note has been submitted for the proceedings of the Workshop on Strings, Duality and Geometry the C.R.M. in Montreal of March 2000.

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In this paper, we are concerned with upper bounds of eigenvalues of Laplace operator on compact Riemannian manifolds and finite graphs. While on the former the Laplace operator is generated by the Riemannian metric, on the latter it reflects combinatorial structure of a graph. Respectively, eigenvalues have many applications in geometry as well as in combinatorics and in other fields of mathematics. We develop a universal approach to upper bounds on both continuous and discrete structures based upon certain properties of the corresponding heat kernel. This approach is perhaps much more general than its realization here. Basically, we start with the following entries:(1) an underlying space M with a finite measure+;(2) a well-defined Laplace operator 2 on functions on M so that 2 is a self-adjoint operator in L2 (M,+) with a discrete spectrum;(3) if M has a boundary, then the boundary condition should be chosen so that it does not disrupt self-adjointness of 2 and is of dissipative nature;(4) a distance function dist (x, y) on M so that|{dist| 1 for an appropriate notion of gradient.

This paper investigates several global rigidity issues for polyhedral surfaces including inversive distance circle packings. Inversive distance circle packings are polyhedral surfaces introduced by P Bowers and K Stephenson in [Mem. Amer. Math. Soc. 170, no. 805, Amer. Math. Soc.(2004)] as a generalization of Andreev and Thurstons circle packing. They conjectured that inversive distance circle packings are rigid. We prove this conjecture using recent work of R Guo [Trans. Amer. Math. Soc. 363 (2011) 47574776] on the variational principle associated to the inversive distance circle packing. We also show that each polyhedral metric on a triangulated surface is determined by various discrete curvatures that we introduced in [arXiv 0612.5714], verifying a conjecture in [arXiv 0612.5714]. As a consequence, we show that the discrete Laplacian operator determines a spherical polyhedral metric.

We examine the impact of small parity-time (PT) symmetric perturbations on nonlinear optical honeycomb lattices in the tight-binding limit. We show for strained lattices that complex dispersion relationships do not form under perturbation, and we find a variety of nonlinear wave equations which describe the effective dynamics in this regime. The existence of semilocalized gap solitons in this case is also shown, though we numerically demonstrate these solitons are likely unstable. We show for unstrained lattices under the effect of a restricted class of PT perturbations, which prevent complex dispersion relationships from appearing, that nontrivial phase dynamics emerge as a result of the PT perturbation. This phase can be understood as momentum imparted to optical beams by the lattice, thus showing PT perturbations offer potentially novel means for the control of light in honeycomb lattices.