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We consider a family of compact manifolds which shrinks with respect to an appropriate parameter to a graph. The main result is that the spectrum of the LaplaceBeltrami operator converges to the spectrum of the (differential) Laplacian on the graph with Kirchhoff boundary conditions at the vertices. On the other hand, if the shrinking at the vertex parts of the manifold is sufficiently slower comparing to that of the edge parts, the limiting spectrum corresponds to decoupled edges with Dirichlet boundary conditions at the endpoints. At the borderline between the two regimes we have a third possibility when the limiting spectrum can be described by a nontrivial coupling at the vertices.

The paper discusses quantum graphs with a vertex coupling which interpolates between the common one of the type and a coupling introduced recently by two of the authors which exhibits a preferred orientation. Describing the interpolation family in terms of circulant matrices, we analyze the spectral and scattering property of such vertices, and investigate the band spectrum of the corresponding square lattice graph.

We establish a generic vanishing theorem for surfaces in characteristic p that lift to p and use it for classification of surfaces of general type with Euler characteristic p and large Albanese dimension.

The Boltzmann H-theorem implies that the solution to the Boltzmann equation tends to an equilibrium, that is, a Maxwellian when time tends to infinity. This has been proved in varies settings when the initial energy is finite. However, when the initial energy is infinite, the time asymptotic state is no longer described by a Maxwellian, but a self-similar solution obtained by Bobylev-Cercignani. The purpose of this paper is to rigorously justify this for the spatially homogeneous problem with Maxwellian molecule type cross section without angular cutoff.