In 1960s, Almgren initiated a program to find minimal hypersurfaces in compact manifolds using min-max method. This program was largely advanced by Pitts and Schoen-Simon in 1980s when the manifold has no boundary. In this paper, we finish this program for general compact manifold with nonempty boundary. As a result, we prove the existence of a smooth embedded minimal hypersurface with free boundary in any compact smooth Euclidean domain. An application of our general existence result combined with the work of Marques and Neves shows that for any compact Riemannian manifolds with nonnegative Ricci curvature and convex boundary, there exist infinitely many embedded minimal hypersurfaces with free boundary which are properly embedded.

Big Data bring new opportunities to modern society and challenges to data scientists. On the one hand, Big Data hold great promises for discovering subtle population patterns and heterogeneities that are not possible with small-scale data. On the other hand, the massive sample size and high dimensionality of Big Data introduce unique computational and statistical challenges, including scalability and storage bottleneck, noise accumulation, spurious correlation, incidental endogeneity and measurement errors. These challenges are distinguished and require new computational and statistical paradigm. This paper gives overviews on the salient features of Big Data and how these features impact on paradigm change on statistical and computational methods as well as computing architectures. We also provide various new perspectives on the Big Data analysis and computation. In particular, we emphasize on

We study the periodic homogenization of first order front propagations. Based on PDE methods, we provide a simple proof that, for n ≥ 3, the class of centrally symmetric polytopes with rational coordinates and nonempty interior is admissible as effective fronts, which was also established by I. Babenko and F. Balacheff [Sur la forme de la boule unit\'e de la norme stable unidimensionnelle, Manuscripta Math. 119 (2006) 347--358] and M. Jotz [Hedlund metrics and the stable norm, Diff. Geometry Appl. 27 (2009) 543--550] in the form of stable norms as an extension of G. A. Hedlund's classical result [Geodesics on a two-dimensional Riemannian manifold with periodic coefficients, Ann. Math. 33 (1932) 719--739]. Besides, we obtain the optimal convergence rate of the homogenization problem for this class.

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