Inspired by works of Castéras (Pac J Math 276:321–345, 2015), Li and Zhu (Calc Var Partial Differ Equ 58:1–18, 2019), Sun and Zhu (Calc Var Partial Differ Equ 60:1–26, 2021), we propose a heat flow for the mean field equation on a connected finite graph G=(V,E). Namely ∂_tϕ(u)=Δu−Q+ρ\frac{e^u}{∫_V e^u dμ} u(⋅,0)=u_0, where Δ is the standard graph Laplacian, ρ is a real number, Q:V→R is a function satisfying ∫_V Qdμ=ρ, and ϕ:R→R is one of certain smooth functions including ϕ(s)=es. We prove that for any initial data u_0 and any ρ∈R, there exists a unique solution u:V×[0,+∞)→R of the above heat flow; moreover, u(x, t) converges to some function u_∞:V→R uniformly in x∈V as t→+∞, and u_∞ is a solution of the mean field equation Δu_∞−Q+ρ\frac{e^{u_∞}}{∫_V e^{u_∞}dμ}=0. Though G is a finite graph, this result is still unexpected, even in the special case Q≡0. Our approach reads as follows: the short time existence of the heat flow follows from the ODE theory; various integral estimates give its long time existence; moreover we establish a Lojasiewicz–Simon type inequality and use it to conclude the convergence of the heat flow.

We study mixing properties of commutative groups of automorphisms acting on compact nilmanifolds. Assuming that every non-trivial element acts ergodically, we prove that such actions are mixing of all orders. We further show exponential 2-mixing and 3-mixing. As an application we prove smooth cocycle rigidity for higher-rank abelian groups of nilmanifold automorphisms.

No abstract uploaded!

No abstract uploaded!

In this paper we present a new algorithm which turns an unstructured triangle mesh into a quad dominant mesh with edges well aligned to the principal directions of the underlying surface. Instead of computing a globally smooth parameterization or integrating curvature lines along a tangent vector field, we simply apply an iterative relaxation scheme which incrementally aligns the mesh edges to the principal directions. We further obtain the quad dominant mesh by dropping the not-aligned diagonal edges from the triangle mesh. A post-processing stage is introduced to further improve the results. The major advantage of our algorithm is its conceptual simplicity since it is merely based on elementary mesh operations such as edge collapse, flip, and split. Various results are presented in the paper; they show a good alignment to surface features and rather uniform distribution of mesh vertices. This makes them well suited, e.g., as CatmullClark Subdivision control meshes.