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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.

This note is based on a series of four lectures the author gave at University of Montpellier, September 28-30, 2015. He started with the notion of mass in general relativity, gave a brief review of some known constructions of quasi-local mass, and then discussed the new quasi-local energy and quasi-local mass which Shing-Tung Yau and the author introduced in 2009. At the end, the proof of the positivity of quasi-local energy was sketched and a stability theorem of critical points of quasi-local energy by Po-Ning Chen, Shing-Tung Yau, and the author was discussed

The standard Yee's scheme for the Maxwell eigenvalue problems places the discrete electric field variable at the midpoints of the edges of the grid cells. It performs well when the permittivity is a scalar field. However, when the permittivity is a Hermitian full tensor filed it would generate un-physical complex eigenvalues or frequencies. In this paper, we propose a finite element method which can be interpreted as a modified Yee's scheme to overcome this difficulty. This interpretation enables us to create a fast FFT eigensolver that can compute very effectively the band structure of the anisotropic photonic crystal with SC and FCC lattices. Furthermore, we overcome the usual large null space associated with the Maxwell eigenvalue problem by deriving a null-space free discrete eigenvalue problem which involves a crucial Hermitian positive definite linear system to be solved in each of the iteration steps. It is demonstrated that the CG method without preconditioning converges in 37 iterations even when the dimension of the matrix is as large as $5,184,000$.

Nonconvex reformulations via low-rank factorization for stochastic convex semidefinite optimization problem have attracted arising attention due to their empirical efficiency and scalability. Compared with the original convex formulations, the nonconvex ones typically involve much fewer variables, allowing them to scale to scenarios with millions of variables. However, it opens a new challenge that under what conditions the nonconvex stochastic algorithms may find the population minimizer within the optimal statistical precision despite their empirical success in applications. In this paper, we provide an answer that the stochastic gradient descent (SGD) method can be adapted to solve the nonconvex reformulation of the original convex problem, with a global linear convergence when using a fixed step size, i.e., converging exponentially fast to the population minimizer within an optimal statistical precision in the restricted strongly convex case. If a diminishing step size is adopted, the bad effect caused by the variance of gradients on the optimization error can be eliminated but the rate is dropped to be sublinear. The core of our treatment relies on a novel second-order descent lemma, which is more general than the existing best result in the literature and improves the analysis on both online and batch algorithms. The developed theoretical results and effectiveness of the suggested SGD are also verified by a series of experiments.