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.

We discuss Nakamaye's Theorem and its recent extension to compact complex manifolds, together with some applications.

Surface registration is widely used in machine vision and medical imaging, where 1-1 correspondences between surfaces are computed to study their variations. Surface maps are usually stored as the 3D coordinates each vertex is mapped to, which often requires lots of storage memory. This causes inconvenience in data transmission and data storage, especially when a large set of surfaces are analyzed. To tackle this problem, we propose a novel representation of surface diffeomorphisms using Beltrami coefficients, which are complex-valued functions defined on surfaces with supreme norm less than 1. Fixing any 3 points on a pair of surfaces, there is a 1-1 correspondence between the set of surface diffeomorphisms between them and the set of Beltrami coefficients on the source domain. Hence, every bijective surface map can be represented by a unique Beltrami coefficient. Conversely, given a Beltrami coefficient, we can reconstruct the unique surface map associated to it using the Beltrami Holomorphic flow (BHF) method introduced in this paper. Using this representation, 1/3 of the storage space is saved. We can further reduce the storage requirement by 90% by compressing the Beltrami coefficients using Fourier approximations. We test our algorithm on synthetic data, real human brain and hippocampal surfaces. Our results show high accuracy in the reconstructed data, while the amount of storage is greatly reduced. Our approach is compared with the Fourier compression of the coordinate functions using the same amount of data. The latter approach often shows jaggy results and cannot guarantee to preserve diffeomorphisms.

In this paper, we develop an energy stable fully discrete discontinuous Galekin (DG) finite element method for the thin film epitaxy problem. Based on the method of lines, we construct and prove the energy stability of the spatial semi-discrete DG scheme firstly. To avoid the strict time step restriction of the explicit time integration method, the first order convex splitting method is used to get an unconditionally stable fully discrete DG method, which is a linearly implicit scheme for this nonlinear problem. The energy stability of the fully discrete convex splitting DG scheme is also proved. To improve the temporal accuracy, spectral deferred correction (SDC) method is adapted to achieve the high order accuracy in both time and space. Combining with the convex splitting method, the SDC method can be linearly solvable, high order accurate and stable in our numerical tests. These advantages ensure that the resulting fully discrete DG scheme is efficient to perform the long time simulation of the thin film epitaxy model. Numerical experiments of the accuracy and long time simulation show the capability and efficiency of the method.

Numerical schemes provably preserving the positivity of density and pressure are highly desirable for ideal magnetohydrodynamics (MHD), but the rigorous positivity-preserving (PP) analysis remains challenging. The difficulties mainly arise from the intrinsic complexity of the MHD equations as well as the indeterminate relation between the PP property and the divergence-free condition on the magnetic field. This paper presents the first rigorous PP analysis of conservative schemes with the Lax--Friedrichs (LF) flux for 1D and multidimensional ideal MHD. The significant innovation is the discovery of the theoretical connection between the PP property and a discrete divergence-free (DDF) condition. This connection is established through the generalized LF splitting properties, which are alternatives to the usually expected LF splitting property that does not hold for ideal MHD. The generalized LF splitting properties involve a number of admissible states strongly coupled by the DDF condition, making their derivation very difficult. We derive these properties via a novel equivalent form of the admissible state set and an important inequality, which is skillfully constructed by technical estimates. Rigorous PP analysis is then presented for finite volume and discontinuous Galerkin schemes with the LF flux on uniform Cartesian meshes. In the 1D case, the PP property is proved for the first-order scheme with proper numerical viscosity, and also for arbitrarily high-order schemes under conditions accessible by a PP limiter. In the 2D case, we show that the DDF condition is necessary and crucial for achieving the PP property. It is observed that even slightly violating the proposed DDF condition may cause failure to preserve the positivity of pressure. We prove that the 2D LF type scheme with proper numerical viscosity preserves both the positivity and the DDF condition. Sufficient conditions are derived for 2D PP high-order schemes, and extension to 3D is discussed. Numerical examples provided in the supplementary material further confirm the theoretical findings.