Given a 3-holed sphere decomposition of an orientable closed surface, it is shown that each orientation preserving homeomorphism of the surface is isotopic to a composition AB where A is a product of positive Dehn twists and B is a product of negative Dehn twists on the decomposition curves.

The goal of smooth function reconstruction on a 2D or 3D manifold is to obtain a smooth function on surfaces or higher dimensional manifolds. It is a common problem in computer graphics and computational mathematics, especially in civil engineering including structural analysis of solid objects. In this chapter, we introduce a new method using harmonic functions for solving this problem. This method contains the following steps: (1) Partition the boundary surfaces of the 3D manifold based on sample points so that each sample point is on the edge of the partition. (2) Use gradually varied interpolation on the edges so that each point on the edge will be assigned a value. In addition, all values on the edge are gradually varied. (3) Use discrete harmonic functions to fit the unknown points, i.e. the points inside each partition patch. This solution of the fitting becomes the piecewise harmonic function.

Let Y be the zero loci of a regular section of a convex vector bundle Y over Y . We provide a proof of a conjecture of Cox, Katz and Lee for the virtual class of the genus zero moduli of stable maps to Y . This in turn yields the expected relationship between Gromov-Witten theories of Y and Y which together with Mirror Theorems allows for the calculation of enumerative invariants of Y inside of Y .

We establish the second part of Milnor's conjecture on the volume of simplexes in hyperbolic and spherical spaces. A characterization of the closure of the space of the angle Gram matrices of simplexes is also obtained.

In the discrete case, surfaces are represented as piecewise linear triangle meshes. Since the Riemannian metric and the Gaussian curvature are discretized as the edge lengths and the angle deficits, the discrete Ricci flow can be defined as the deformation of edge lengths driven by the discrete curvature. We invented numerical algorithms to compute Riemannian metrics with prescribed Gaussian curvatures using discrete Ricci flow. We also showed broad applications using discrete Ricci flow in graphics, geometric modeling, and medical imaging, such as surface parameterization, surface matching, manifold splines, and construction of geometric structures on general surfaces.