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.

We study how to characterize the families of paths between any two nodes s, t in a sensor network with holes. Two paths that can be deformed to one another through local changes are called homotopy equivalent. Two paths that pass around holes in different ways have different homotopy types. With a distributed algorithm we compute an embedding of the network in hyperbolic space by using Ricci flow such that paths of different homotopy types are mapped naturally to paths connecting s with different images of t. Greedy routing to a particular image is guaranteed with success to find a path with a given homotopy type. This leads to simple greedy routing algorithms that are resilient to both local link dynamics and large scale jamming attacks and improve load balancing over previous greedy routing algorithms.

We present a novel area-preservation mapping/flattening method using the optimal mass transport technique, based on the Monge-Brenier theory. Our optimal transport map approach is rigorous and solid in theory, efficient and parallel in computation, yet general for various applications. By comparison with the conventional Monge-Kantorovich approach, our method reduces the number of variables from O(n²) to O(n), and converts the optimal mass transport problem to a convex optimization problem, which can now be efficiently carried out by Newton's method. Furthermore, our framework includes the area weighting strategy that enables users to completely control and adjust the size of areas everywhere in an accurate and quantitative way. Our method significantly reduces the complexity of the problem, and improves the efficiency, flexibility and scalability during visualization. Our framework, by combining

Greedy forwarding with geographical locations in a wireless sensor network may fail at a local minimum. In this paper we propose to use conformal mapping to compute a new embedding of the sensor nodes in the plane such that greedy forwarding with the virtual coordinates guarantees delivery. In particular, we extract a planar triangulation of the sensor network with non-triangular faces as holes, by either using the nodes' location or using a landmark-based scheme without node location. The conformal map is computed with Ricci flow such that all the non-triangular faces are mapped to perfect circles. Thus greedy forwarding will never get stuck at an intermediate node. The computation of the conformal map and the virtual coordinates is performed at a preprocessing phase and can be implemented by local gossip-style computation. The method applies to both unit disk graph models and quasi-unit disk graph

This goal of the paper is to show that the automorphisms of the complex of curves in a surface are induced by the self-homeomorphisms of the surface except the surface is the 2-holed torus.