Pop-up books are a fascinating form of paper art with intriguing geometric properties. In this paper, we present a systematic study of a simple but common class of pop-ups consisting of patches falling into four parallel groups, which we call v-style pop-ups. We give sufficient conditions for a v-style paper structure to be pop-uppable. That is, it can be closed flat while maintaining the rigidity of the patches, the closing and opening do not need extra force besides holding two patches and are free of intersections, and the closed paper is contained within the page border. These conditions allow us to identify novel mechanisms for making pop-ups. Based on the theory and mechanisms, we developed an interactive tool for designing v-style pop-ups and an automated construction algorithm from a given geometry, both of which guaranteeing the popuppability of the results.

It is classically known that complete flat (that is, zero Gaussian curvature) surfaces in Euclidean 3-space R3 are cylinders over space curves. This implies that the study of global behaviour of flat surfaces requires the study of singular points as well. If a flat surface f admits singularities but its Gauss map  is globally defined on the surface and can be smoothly extended across the singular set, f is called a frontal. In addition, if the pair (f, ) defines an immersion into R3×S2, f is called a front. A front f is called flat if the Gauss map degenerates everywhere. The parallel surfaces and the caustic (i.e. focal surface) of a flat front f are also flat fronts. In this paper, we generalize the classical notion of completeness to flat fronts, and give a representation formula for a flat front which has a non-empty compact singular set and whose ends are all immersed and complete. As an application, we show that such a flat front has properly embedded ends if and only if its Gauss map image is a convex curve. Moreover, we show the existence of at least four singular points other than cuspidal edges on such a flat front with embedded ends, which is a variant of the classical four vertex theorem for convex plane curves.

We show that the exterior derivative operator on a symplectic manifold has a natural decomposition into two linear differential operators, analogous to the Dolbeault operators in complex geometry. These operators map primitive forms into primitive forms and therefore lead directly to the construction of primitive cohomologies on symplectic manifolds. Using these operators, we introduce new primitive cohomologies that are analogous to the Dolbeault cohomology in the complex theory. Interestingly, the finiteness of these primitive cohomologies follows directly from an elliptic complex. We calculate the known primitive cohomologies on a nilmanifold and show that their dimensions can vary with the class of the symplectic form.

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