This article introduces the large portfolio selection using gross-exposure constraints. It shows that with gross-exposure constraints, the empirically selected optimal portfolios based on estimated covariance matrices have similar performance to the theoretical optimal ones and there is no error accumulation effect from estimation of vast covariance matrices. This gives theoretical justification to the empirical results by Jagannathan and Ma. It also shows that the no-short-sale portfolio can be improved by allowing some short positions. The applications to portfolio selection, tracking, and improvements are also addressed. The utility of our new approach is illustrated by simulation and empirical studies on the 100 FamaFrench industrial portfolios and the 600 stocks randomly selected from Russell 3000.

A two species interacting system motivated by the density functional theory for triblock copolymers contains long range interaction that affects the two species differently. In a two species periodic assembly of discs, the two species appear alternately on a lattice. The minimal two species periodic assembly is the one with the least energy per lattice cell area. There is a parameter $b$ in $[0,1]$ and the type of the lattice associated with the minimal assembly varies depending on $b$. There are several threshold defined by a number $B=0.1867...$ If $b \in [0, B)$, the minimal assembly is associated with a rectangular lattice whose ratio of the longer side and the shorter side is in $[\sqrt{3}, 1)$; if $b \in [B, 1-B]$, the minimal assembly is associated with a square lattice; if $b \in (1-B, 1]$, the minimal assembly is associated with a rhombic lattice with an acute angle in $[\frac{\pi}{3}, \frac{\pi}{2})$. Only when $b=1$, this rhombic lattice is the hexagonal lattice. None of the other values of $b$ yields the hexagonal lattice, a sharp contrast to the situation for one species interacting systems, where the hexagonal lattice is ubiquitously observed.

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Surface conformal maps between genus-0 surfaces play important roles in applied mathematics and engineering, with applications in medical image analysis and computer graphics. Previous work (Gu and Yau in Commun Inf Syst 2(2):121–146, 2002) introduces a variational approach, where global conformal parameterization of genus-0 surfaces was addressed through minimizing the harmonic energy, with two weaknesses: its gradient descent iteration is slow, and its solutions contain undesired parameterization foldings when the underlying surface has long sharp features. In this paper, we propose an algorithm that significantly accelerates the harmonic energy minimization and a method that iteratively removes foldings by taking advantages of the weighted Laplace–Beltrami eigen-projection. Experimental results show that the proposed approaches compute genus-0 surface harmonic maps much faster than the existing algorithm in Gu and Yau (Commun Inf Syst 2(2):121–146, 2002) and the new results contain no foldings.

We study the rigidity of polyhedral surfaces and the moduli space of polyhedral surfaces using variational principles. Curvaturelike quantities for polyhedral surfaces are introduced and are shown to determine the polyhedral metric up to isometry. The action functionals in the variational approaches are derived from the cosine law. They can be considered as 2-dimensional counterparts of the Schlaefli formula.