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

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Using a geometric method, we characterize all entire functions that transform the Bloch space into a Bergman space by superposition in terms of their order and type. We also prove that all superposition operators induced by such entire functions act boundedly. Similar results hold for superpositions from BMOA into Bergman spaces and from the Bloch space into certain weighted Hardy spaces.

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In this survey paper, we will present the recent work on the study of the compressible fluids with vacuum states by illustrating its interesting and singular behavior through some systems of fluid dynamics, that is, Euler equations, EulerPoisson equations and NavierStokes equations. The main concern is the well-posedness of the problem when vacuum presents and the singular behavior of the solution near the interface separating the vacuum and the gas. Furthermore, the relation of the solutions for the gas dynamics with vacuum to those of the Boltzmann equation will also be discussed. In fact, the results obtained so far for vacuum states are far from being complete and satisfactory. Therefore, this paper can only be served as an introduction to this interesting field which has many open and challenging mathematical problems. Moreover, the problems considered here are limited to the author's interest and