We study the minimal length elements in some double cosets of Coxeter groups and use them to study Lusztig's <i>G</i>-stable pieces and the generalization of <i>G</i>-stable pieces introduced by Lu and Yakimov. We also use them to study the minimal length elements in a conjugacy class of a finite Coxeter group and prove a conjecture in [M. Geck, S. Kim, G. Pfeiffer, Minimal length elements in twisted conjugacy classes of finite Coxeter groups, J. Algebra 229 (2) (2000) 570600].

In the paper [4], the authors proposed a derivative-free descent algorithm for the nonlinear complementarity problems (NCPs) by the generalized Fischer-Burmeister merit function: p (a, b)= 1

We propose a numerical approach to solve variational problems on manifolds represented by the grid based particle method (GBPM) recently developed in Leung et al. (J. Comput. Phys. 230(7):25402561, 2011), Leung and Zhao (J. Comput. Phys. 228:77067728, 2009a, J. Comput. Phys. 228:29933024, 2009b, Commun. Comput. Phys. 8:758796, 2010). In particular, we propose a splitting algorithm for image segmentation on manifolds represented by unconnected sampling particles. To develop a fast minimization algorithm, we propose a new splitting method by generalizing the augmented Lagrangian method. To efficiently implement the resulting method, we incorporate with the local polynomial approximations of the manifold in the GBPM. The resulting method is flexible for segmentation on various manifolds including closed or open or even surfaces which are not orientable.

Recent compressive sensing results show that it is possible to accurately reconstruct certain compressible signals from relatively few linear measurements via solving nonsmooth convex optimization problems. In this paper, we propose the use of the alternating direction method - a classic approach for optimization problems with separable variables (D. Gabay and B. Mercier, A dual algorithm for the solution of nonlinear variational problems via finite-element approximations, Computer and Mathematics with Applications, vol. 2, pp. 17-40, 1976; R. Glowinski and A. Marrocco, Sur lapproximation par elements finis dordre un, et la resolution par penalisation-dualite dune classe de problemes de Dirichlet nonlineaires, Rev. Francaise dAut. Inf. Rech. Oper., vol. R-2, pp. 41-76, 1975) - for signal reconstruction from partial Fourier (i.e., incomplete frequency) measurements. Signals are reconstructed as minimizers of

We consider a graph G and a covering G of G and we study the relations of their eigenvalues and heat kernels. We evaluate the heat kernel for an infinite k-regular tree and we examine the heat kernels for general k-regular graphs. In particular, we show that a k-regular graph on n vertices has at most (1+ o (1)) 2 log n knlog k