We study the rigidity of polyhedral surfaces using variational principles. The action functionals are derived from the cosine laws. The main focus of this paper is on the cosine law for a nontriangular region bounded by three possibly disjoint geodesics. Several of these cosine laws were first discovered and used by Fenchel and Nielsen. By studying the derivative of the cosine laws, we discover a uniform approach to several variational principles on polyhedral surfaces with or without boundary. As a consequence, the work of Penner, Bobenko and Springborn and Thurston on rigidity of polyhedral surfaces and circle patterns are extended to a very general context.

The LaplaceBeltrami operator of a smooth Riemannian manifold is determined by the Riemannian metric. Conversely, the heat kernel constructed from the eigenvalues and eigenfunctions of the LaplaceBeltrami operator determines the Riemannian metric. This work proves the analogy on Euclidean polyhedral surfaces (triangle meshes), that the discrete heat kernel and the discrete Riemannian metric (unique up to a scaling) are mutually determined by each other. Given a Euclidean polyhedral surface, its Riemannian metric is represented as edge lengths, satisfying triangle inequalities on all faces. The LaplaceBeltrami operator is formulated using the cotangent formula, where the edge weight is defined as the sum of the cotangent of angles against the edge. We prove that the edge lengths can be determined by the edge weights unique up to a scaling using the variational approach.

Given a compact orientable surface with finitely many punctures \Sigma , let $\Cal S (\Sigma) $ be the set of isotopy classes of essential unoriented simple closed curves in \Sigma . We determine a complete set of relations for a function from $\Cal S (\Sigma) $ to $\bold R $ to be the geodesic length function of a hyperbolic metric with geodesic boundary and cusp ends on \Sigma . As a conse quence, the Teichmller space of hyperbolic metrics with geodesic boundary and cusp ends on \Sigma is reconstructed from an intrinsic $(\bold QP^ 1, PSL (2,\bold Z)) $ structure on $\Cal S (\Sigma) $.

Surface based 3D shape analysis plays a fundamental role in computer vision and medical imaging. This work proposes to use optimal mass transport map for shape matching and comparison, focusing on two important applications including surface registration and shape space. The computation of the optimal mass transport map is based on Monge-Brenier theory, in comparison to the conventional method based on Monge-Kantorovich theory, this method significantly improves the efficiency by reducing computational complexity from O(n ² ) to O(n). For surface registration problem, one commonly used approach is to use conformal map to convert the shapes into some canonical space. Although conformal mappings have small angle distortions, they may introduce large area distortions which are likely to cause numerical instability thus resulting failures of shape analysis. This work proposes to compose the

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.