Submission of a manuscript implies: that the work described has not been published before (except in the form of an abstract or as part of a published lecture, review, or thesis); that it is not under consideration for publication elsewhere; that its publication has been approved by all coauthors, if any, as well as by the responsible authorities at the institute where the work has been carried out; that, if and when the manuscript is accepted for publication, the authors agree to automatic transfer of the copyright to the publisher; and that the manuscript will not be published elsewhere in any language without the consent of the copyright holders.

We prove theorems on the structure of the fundamental group of a compact riemannian manifold of non-positive curvature. In particular, a conjecture of J. Wolf [<i>J. Differential Geometry</i>, 2, 421-446 (1968)] is proved.

The chapter discusses the group actions on R³. The Smith conjecture has many equivalent forms, and each of these forms has various consequences and generalizations. The Smith conjecture is a structure theorem about symmetries of the product of a compact surface with an interval. Here the interval may be closed or open. The usual Smith conjecture is equivalent to proving the smooth <i>Z_n</i> actions on <i>S</i>² [0, 1] are conjugate to actions that preserve the product structure. This generalized Smith conjecture represents the belief that all the symmetries of the product of a compact surface with an interval actually arise from the symmetries of the surface extended trivially to the product structure. The chapter presents how to apply minimal surfaces to study the generalized Smith conjecture on <i>S</i>² <i>I</i>, where <i>I</i> is an open or closed interval. A geodesic version of the loop theorem and a new equivariant

During the past year a group of 12 graduate students, a visiting researcher and a postdoctoral fellow, supported in part by this contract, have studied various nonlinear partial differential equations. Seminars were held twice weekly on the topic of soliton theory. The graduate students involved have been studying the problem of singularity that arises in nonlinear equations.

As a continuation of\lianyaufour, we study modular properties of the periods, the mirror maps and Yukawa couplings for multi-moduli Calabi-Yau varieties. In Part A of this paper, motivated by the recent work of Kachru-Vafa, we degenerate a three-moduli family of Calabi-Yau toric varieties along a codimension one subfamily which can be described by the vanishing of certain Mori coordinate, corresponding to going to the``large volume limit''in a certain direction. Then we see that the deformation space of the subfamily is the same as a certain family of K3 toric surfaces. This family can in turn be studied by further degeneration along a subfamily which in the end is described by a family of elliptic curves. The periods of the K3 family (and hence the original Calabi-Yau family) can be described by the squares of the periods of the elliptic curves. The consequences include:(1) proofs of various conjectural formulas of physicists\vk\lkm involving mirror maps and modular functions;(2) new identities involving multi-variable hypergeometric series and modular functions--generalizing\lianyaufour. In Part B, we study for two-moduli families the perturbation series of the mirror map and the type A Yukawa couplings near certain large volume limits. Our main tool is a new class of polynomial PDEs associated with Fuchsian PDE systems. We derive the first few terms in the perturbation series. For the case of degree 12 hypersurfaces in\P^ 4 [6, 2, 2, 1, 1], in one limit the series of the couplings are expressed in terms of the j function. In another limit, they are expressed in terms of rational functions. The latter give explicit formulas for infinite sequences of``instanton