The system of absolute value equation, denoted by AVE, is a non-differentiable NP-hard problem. Many approaches have been proposed during the past decade and most of them focus on reformulating it as complementarity problem and then solve it accordingly. Another approach is to recast the AVE as a system of nonsmooth equations and then tackle with the nonsmooth equations. In this paper, we follow this path. In particular, we rewrite it as a system of smooth equations and propose four new smoothing functions along with a smoothing-type algorithm to solve the system of equations. The main contribution of this paper focuses on numerical comparisons which suggest a better choice of smoothing function along with the smoothing-type algorithm.

We propose a formula for the exact central charge of a B-type D-brane that is expected to hold in all regions of the Kähler moduli space of a Calabi–Yau. For Landau–Ginzburg orbifolds we propose explicit expressions for the mathematical objects that enter into the central charge formula. We show that our results are consistent with results in FJRW theory and the hemisphere partition function of the gauged linear sigma model.

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This paper applies$K$-homology to solve the index problem for a class of hypoelliptic (but not elliptic) operators on contact manifolds.$K$-homology is the dual theory to$K$-theory. We explicitly calculate the$K$-cycle (i.e., the element in geometric$K$-homology) determined by any hypoelliptic Fredholm operator in the Heisenberg calculus.

We adapt the Douglas–Rachford (DR) splitting method to solve nonconvex feasibility problems by studying this method for a class of nonconvex optimization problem. While the convergence properties of the method for convex problems have been well studied, far less is known in the nonconvex setting. In this paper, for the direct adaptation of the method to minimize the sum of a proper closed function g and a smooth function f with a Lipschitz continuous gradient, we show that if the step-size parameter is smaller than a computable threshold and the sequence generated has a cluster point, then it gives a stationary point of the optimization problem. Convergence of the whole sequence and a local convergence rate are also established under the additional assumption that f and g are semi-algebraic. We also give simple sufficient conditions guaranteeing the boundedness of the sequence generated. We then apply our nonconvex DR splitting method to finding a point in the intersection of a closed convex set C and a general closed set D by minimizing the squared distance to C subject to D. We show that if either set is bounded and the step-size parameter is smaller than a computable threshold, then the sequence generated from the DR splitting method is actually bounded. Consequently, the sequence generated will have cluster points that are stationary for an optimization problem, and the whole sequence is convergent under an additional assumption that C and D are semi-algebraic. We achieve these results based on a new merit function constructed particularly for the DR splitting method. Our numerical results indicate that our DR splitting method usually outperforms the usual DR splitting method and the alternating projection method in finding a sparse solution of a linear system, in terms of both the solution quality and the number of iterations taken.