In this paper, we introduce the first Aeppli-Chern class for complex manifolds and show that the $(1,1)$- component of the curvature $2$-form of the Levi-Civita connection on the anti-canonical line bundle represents this class. We systematically investigate the relationship between a variety of Ricci curvatures on Hermitian manifolds and the background Riemannian manifolds. Moreover, we study non-K\"ahler Calabi-Yau manifolds by using the first Aeppli-Chern class and the Levi-Civita Ricci-flat metrics. In particular, we construct explicit Levi-Civita Ricci-flat metrics on Hopf manifolds $\S^{2n-1}\times \S^1$. We also construct a smooth family of Gauduchon metrics on a compact Hermitian manifold such that the metrics are in the same first Aeppli-Chern class, and their first Chern-Ricci curvatures are the same and nonnegative, but their Riemannian scalar curvatures are constant and vary smoothly between negative infinity and a positive number. In particular, it shows that Hermitian manifolds with nonnegative first Chern class can admit Hermitian metrics with strictly negative Riemannian scalar curvature.

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We establish a parametric extension$h$-principle for overtwisted contact structures on manifolds of all dimensions, which is the direct generalization of the 3-dimensional result from [12]. It implies, in particular, that any closed manifold admits a contact structure in any given homotopy class of almost contact structures.

Motivated by an extra credit problem from our Linear Algebra class, we study the invertibility probability of binary matrices (the number of invertible binary matrices divided by the total number of binary matrices). Binary matrices are of interest in combinatorics, information theory, cryptology, and graph theory. It is known that the invertibility probability of n × n binary matrices goes to 1 as n→∞. We conjecture that this probability monotonically increases as the size of the binary matrix increases, and we investigate this by exploring how n×n binary matrices of rank n and rank (n−1) can be enlarged to (n + 1) × (n + 1) invertible binary matrices. Calculating this explicitly for the identity matrix, we obtain a probable bound that would show that, in a sense, our conjecture is asymptotically true. With the use of a computer, we also computed how many (n + 1) × (n + 1) invertible binary matrices can be enlarged from n×n matrices of rank n and rank (n−1) for small n. In addition, we study the invertibility probability of matrices with entries in Z_q.