The purpose of the present paper is the solution of the boundary value problems for minimal surfaces when the boundaries are not, or not entirely-fixed Jordan curves but are free to move on prescribed manifolds. At the same time I shall present modifications and simplifications of my previous solution of the Plateau' and Douglas' problem for fixed boundary curves and prescribed topological structure and incidentally discuss certain features of the problem in order to clarify its relation to the theory of conformal mapping. Though based on previous publications, the paper may, except for some references, be read independently.

Structures and functions of proteins play various essential roles in biological processes. The functions of newly discovered proteins can be predicted by comparing their structures with that of known functional proteins. Many approaches have been proposed for measuring the protein structure similarity, such as the template-modeling (TM)-score method, GRaphlet (GR)-Align method as well as the commonly used root-mean-square deviation (RMSD) measures. However, the alignment comparisons between the similarity of protein structure cost much time on large dataset, and the accuracy still have room to improve. In this study, we introduce a new three-dimensional (3D) Yau–Hausdorff distance between any two 3D objects. The (3D) Yau–Hausdorff distance can be used in particular to measure the similarity/dissimilarity of two proteins of any size and does not need aligning and super- imposing two structures. We apply structural similarity to study function similarity and perform phylogenetic analysis on several datasets. The results show that (3D) Yau–Hausdorff distance could serve as a more precise and effective method to discover biological relationships between proteins than other methods on structure comparison.

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We study a robust and efficient eigensolver for computing a few smallest positive eigenvalues of the three-dimensional Maxwell’s transmission eigenvalue problem. The discretized governing equations by the Nedelec edge element result in a large-scale quadratic eigenvalue problem (QEP) for which the spectrum contains many zero eigenvalues and the coefficient matrices consist of patterns in the matrix form XY^{−1}Z, both of which prevent existing eigenvalue solvers from being efficient. To remedy these difficulties, we rewrite the QEP as a particular nonlinear eigenvalue problem and develop a secant-type iteration, together with an indefinite locally optimal block preconditioned conjugate gradient method (LOBPCG), to sequentially compute the desired positive eigenvalues. Furthermore, we propose a novel method to solve the linear systems in each iteration of LOBPCG. Intensive numerical experiments show that our proposed method is robust, although the desired real eigenvalues are surrounded by complex eigenvalues.

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