Some uniform theorems on the artinianness of certain local cohomology modules are proven in a general situation. They generalize and imply previous results about the artinianness of some special local cohomology modules in the graded case.

It is known that finitely generated FI-modules over a field of characteristic 0 are Noetherian. We generalize this result to the abstract setting of an infinite EI category satisfying certain combinatorial conditions.

Lutwak, Yang and Zhang defined the cone volume functional U over convex polytopes in R^n containing the origin in their interiors, and conjectured that the greatest lower bound on the ratio of this centro-affine invariant U to volume V is attained by parallelotopes. In this paper, we give affirmative answers to the conjecture in R^2 and R^3. Some new sharp inequalities characterizing parallelotopes in Rn are established. Moreover, a simplified proof for the conjecture restricted to the class of origin-symmetric convex polytopes in Rn is provided.

This paper studies affine Deligne-Lusztig varieties $X_{w}(b)$ in the affine flag variety of a quasi-split tamely ramified group. We describe the geometric structure of $X_{w}(b)$ for a minimal length element $w$ in the conjugacy class of an extended affine Weyl group, generalizing one of the main results in \cite{HL} to the affine case. We then provide a reduction method that relates the structure of $X_{w}(b)$ for arbitrary elements $w$ in the extended affine Weyl group to those associated with minimal length elements. Based on this reduction, we establish a connection between the dimension of affine Deligne-Lusztig varieties and the degree of the class polynomial of affine Hecke algebras. As a consequence, we prove a conjecture of G\"ortz, Haines, Kottwitz and Reuman in \cite{GHKR}.

We study period integrals of CY hypersurfaces in a partial flag variety. We construct a holonomic system of differential equations which govern the period integrals. By means of representation theory, a set of generators of the system can be described explicitly. The results are also generalized to CY complete intersections. The construction of these new systems of differential equations have lead us to the notion of a tautological system.