We give an overview of our philosophy of pictures in mathematics. We emphasize a bidirectional process between picture lan- guage and mathematical concepts: abstraction and simulation. This motivates a program to understand different subjects, using virtual and real mathematical concepts simulated by pictures.

This survey paper is based on the lecture notes for the mini course in the summer school at Yau Mathematics Science Center, Tsinghua University, 2014. We describe and characterize all random subsets $K$ of simply connected domain which satisfy the ``conformal restriction" property. There are two different types of random sets: the chordal case and the radial case. In the chordal case, the random set $K$ in the upper half-plane $\HH$ connects two fixed boundary points, say 0 and $\infty$, and given that $K$ stays in a simply connected open subset $H$ of $\HH$, the conditional law of $\Phi(K)$ is identical to that of $K$, where $\Phi$ is any conformal map from $H$ onto $\HH$ fixing 0 and $\infty$. In the radial case, the random set $K$ in the upper half-plane $\HH$ connects one fixed boundary points, say 0, and one fixed interior point, say $i$, and given that $K$ stays in a simply connected open subset $H$ of $\HH$, the conditional law of $\Phi(K)$ is identical to that of $K$, where $\Phi$ is the conformal map from $H$ onto $\HH$ fixing 0 and $i$. It turns out that the random set with conformal restriction property are closely related to the intersection exponents of Brownian motion. The construction of these random sets relies on Schramm Loewner Evolution with parameter $\kappa=8/3$ and Poisson point processes of Brownian excursions and Brownian loops.

We consider a L 2-contraction (a L 2-type stability) of large viscous shock waves for the multi-dimensional scalar viscous conservation laws, up to a suitable shift by using the relative entropy methods. Quite different from the previous results, we find a new way to determine the shift function, which depends both on the time and space variables and solves a viscous Hamilton-Jacobi type equation with source terms. Moreover, we do not impose any conditions on the anti-derivative variables of the perturbation around the shock profile. More precisely, it is proved that if the initial perturbation around the viscous shock wave is suitably small in L 2-norm, then the L 2-contraction holds true for the viscous shock wave up to a suitable shift function. Note that BV-norm or the L-norm of the initial perturbation and the shock wave strength can be arbitrarily large. Furthermore, as the time t tends to infinity, the L 2-contraction holds

We introduce symplectic Calabi–Yau caps to obtain new obstructions to exact fillings. In particular, they imply that any exact filling of the standard contact structure on the unit cotangent bundle of a hyperbolic surface has vanishing first Chern class and has the same integral homology and intersection form as its disk cotangent bundle. This gives evidence to a conjecture that all of its exact fillings are diffeomorphic to the disk cotangent bundle. As a result, we also obtain the first infinite family of Stein fillable contact 3-manifolds with uniform bounds on the Betti numbers of its exact fillings but admitting minimal strong fillings of arbitrarily large b2. Moreover, we introduce the notion of symplectic uniruled/adjunction caps and uniruled/ adjunction contact structures to present a unified picture to the existing finiteness results on the topological invariants of exact/strong fillings of a contact 3-manifold. As a byproduct, we find new classes of contact 3-manifolds with the finiteness properties and extend Wand’s obstruction of planar contact 3-manifolds to uniruled/adjunction contact structures with complexity zero.

No abstract uploaded!