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

Durhuus and Jonsson (1995) introduced the class of “locally constructible” (LC) 3-spheres and showed that there are only exponentially many combinatorial types of simplicial LC 3-spheres. Such upper bounds are crucial for the convergence of models for 3D quantum gravity.

In this paper, we give a simultaneous vanishing principle for the $v$-adic Carlitz multiple polylogarithms (abbreviated as CMPLs) at algebraic points, where $v$ is a finite place of the rational function field over a finite field. This principle establishes the fact that the $v$-adic vanishing of CMPLs at algebraic points is equivalent to its $\infty$-adic counterpart being Eulerian. This reveals a nontrivial connection between the $v$-adic and $\infty$-adic worlds in positive characteristic.

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