In this paper, we study the Kurdyka–Łojasiewicz (KL) exponent, an important quantity for analyzing the convergence rate of first-order methods. Specifically, we develop various calculus rules to deduce the KL exponent of new (possibly nonconvex and nonsmooth) functions formed from functions with known KL exponents. In addition, we show that the well-studied Luo–Tseng error bound together with a mild assumption on the separation of stationary values implies that the KL exponent is 1/2 . The Luo–Tseng error bound is known to hold for a large class of concrete structured optimization problems, and thus we deduce the KL exponent of a large class of functions whose exponents were previously unknown. Building upon this and the calculus rules, we are then able to show that for many convex or nonconvex optimization models for applications such as sparse recovery, their objective function’s KL exponent is 1/2 . This includes the least squares problem with smoothly clipped absolute deviation regularization or minimax concave penalty regularization and the logistic regression problem with l_1 regularization. Since many existing local convergence rate analysis for first-order methods in the nonconvex scenario relies on the KL exponent,our results enable us to obtain explicit convergence rate for various first-order methods when they are applied to a large variety of practical optimization models. Finally, we further illustrate how our results can be applied to establishing local linear convergence of the proximal gradient algorithm and the inertial proximal algorithm with constant step sizes for some specific models that arise in sparse recovery.

IT IS well-known that if a compact group acts differentiably on a differentiable manifold, then this group must preserve some Riemannian metric on this manifold. From this point of view, we shall discuss certain facts about group actions on manifolds. In 01, we study the group of isometries of a non-compact manifold. We discover that if the group is non-compact, the manifold has to split as a product of the Euclidean space and another manifold. This gives some information on problem 33 of [5]. It also gives some information on the group of biholomorphic transformations of a complex manifold whose Bergman metric is not trivial. Then we find a topological obstruction for a non-compact manifold to admit an infinite group to act freely and properly discontinuously. Namely, we prove that the natural map from the de Rham cohomology group with compact support to the de Rham cohomology group without compact support is trivial when the first group has finite dimension. In $2, we obtain some topological obstructions for group actions by looking at the complex of invariant differential forms. We prove, for example, that if a compact group acts on a compact manifold with non-zero Euler number, then wI A*** A ut+,= 0 for all closed invariant l-forms wl,..., Ok+ 1 with k 2 the codimension of the principle orbit.(It may be interesting to note that the vanishing is on the form level so that any secondary obstruction should also vanish.) We also prove a topological version of this theorem for circle actions. An interesting corollary is that if a manifold is the connected sum of a torus and a compact manifold with Euler number# 2, then it does not admit any circle actions

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Einstein’s theory of general relativity is based on the desire to merge the newly developed theory of special relativity and Newton’s theory of gravity. He accomplished this daunting task in 1915. Most physicists consider this to be the most creative work in science in the history of mankind. This talk will explain some part of this theory.

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