Given an involution on a rational homology 3-sphere Y with quotient the 3-sphere, we prove a formula for the Lefschetz number of the map induced by this involution in the reduced monopole Floer homology. This formula is motivated by a variant of Witten's conjecture relating the Donaldson and Seiberg--Witten invariants of 4-manifolds. A key ingredient is a skein-theoretic argument, making use of an exact triangle in monopole Floer homology, that computes the Lefschetz number in terms of the Murasugi signature of the branch set and the sum of Frøyshov invariants associated to spin structures on Y. We discuss various applications of our formula in gauge theory, knot theory, contact geometry, and 4-dimensional topology.

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In an infinite sequence of independent identically distributed continuous random variables we study the number of strings of two subsequent records interrupted by a given number of non-records. By embedding in a marked Poisson process we prove that these counts are independent and Poisson distributed. Also the distribution of the number of uninterrupted strings of records is considered.

Given a family of nodal curves, a semistable modification of it is another family made up of curves obtained by inserting chains of rational curves of any given length at certain nodes of certain curves of the original family. We give comparison theorems between torsion-free, rank-1 sheaves in the former family and invertible sheaves in the latter. We apply them to show that there are functorial isomorphisms between the compactifications of relative Jacobians of families of nodal curves constructed through Caporaso’s approach and those constructed through Pandharipande’s approach.

A novel discontinuous Galerkin (DG) method is developed to solve timedependent bi-harmonic type equations involving fourth derivatives in one and multiple space dimensions. We present the spatial DG discretization based on a mixed formulation and central interface numerical fluxes so that the resulting semi-discrete schemes are L^2 stable even without interior penalty. For time discretization, we use Crank–Nicolson so that the resulting scheme is unconditionally stable and second order in time. We present the optimal L^2 error estimate of O(h^{k+1}) for polynomials of degree k for semi-discrete DG schemes, and the L2 error of O(h^{k+1} + (\Delta t)^2) for fully discrete DG schemes. Extensions to more general fourth order partial differential equations and cases with non-homogeneous boundary conditions are provided. Numerical results are presented to verify the stability and accuracy of the schemes. Finally, an application to the one-dimensional Swift–Hohenberg equation endowed with a decay free energy is presented.