arXiv research

Investigates stability of piecewise flat Ricci flow using analysis and simulations.

Piecewise flat approximations for curvature in Euclidean and non-Euclidean spaces.

A piecewise flat Finsler metric on a triangulated surface $M$ is a metric whose restriction to any triangle is a flat triangle in some Minkowski space with straight edges. One of the main purposes of this work is to study the properties of geodesics on a piecewise flat Finsler surface, especially when it meets a vertex…

Simplicial, piecewise-flat discretizations of manifolds provide a clear path towards curvature analysis on discrete geometries and for solutions of PDE's on manifolds of complex topologies. In this manuscript we review and expand on discrete exterior calculus methods using hybrid domains. We then analyze the geometric …

A piecewise flat manifold is a triangulated manifold given a geometry by specifying edge lengths (lengths of 1-simplices) and specifying that all simplices are Euclidean. We consider the variation of angles of piecewise flat manifolds as the geometry varies in a particular way, which we call a conformal variation. This…

Discrete forms of the scalar, sectional and Ricci curvatures are constructed on simplicial piecewise flat triangulations of smooth manifolds, depending directly on the simplicial structure and a choice of dual tessellation. This is done by integrating over volumes which include appropriate samplings of hinges for each …

Discretizations of the mean curvature and extrinsic curvature components are constructed on piecewise flat simplicial manifolds, giving approximations for smooth curvature values in a mostly mesh-independent way. These constructions are given in combinatoric form in terms of the extrinsic hinge angles, the intrinsic st…

We introduce a new multi-dimensional nonlinear embedding -- Piecewise Flat Embedding (PFE) -- for image segmentation. Based on the theory of sparse signal recovery, piecewise flat embedding with diverse channels attempts to recover a piecewise constant image representation with sparse region boundaries and sparse clust…

Using a recently developed piecewise flat method, numerical evolutions of the Ricci flow are computed for a number of manifolds, using a number of different mesh types, and shown to converge to the expected smooth behaviour as the mesh resolution is increased. The manifolds were chosen to have varying degrees of homoge…

First explicit isometric immersion of a flat Klein bottle in 3D space.

In this paper we develop an approach to conformal geometry of piecewise flat metrics on manifolds. In particular, we formulate the combinatorial Yamabe problem for piecewise flat metrics. In the case of surfaces, we define the combinatorial Yamabe flow on the space of all piecewise flat metrics associated to a triangul…

The double tetrahedron is the triangulation of the three-sphere gotten by gluing together two congruent tetrahedra along their boundaries. As a piecewise flat manifold, its geometry is determined by its six edge lengths, giving a notion of a metric on the double tetrahedron. We study notions of Einstein metrics, consta…

We study the problem of estimating a manifold from random samples. In particular, we consider piecewise constant and piecewise linear estimators induced by k-means and k-flats, and analyze their performance. We extend previous results for k-means in two separate directions. First, we provide new results for k-means rec…

We examine a Type-1 neck pinch singularity in simplicial Ricci flow (SRF) for an axisymmetric piecewise flat 3-dimensional geometry with 3-sphere topology. SRF was recently introduced as an unstructured mesh formulation of Hamilton's Ricci flow (RF). It describes the RF of a piecewise-flat simplicial geometry. In this …

Universal triangulation for flat tori with 2434 triangles.

Piecewise Euclidean structures (identified solid Euclidean polyhedra) on topological 3-dimensional manifolds and pseudo-manifolds are constructed so that they admit pseudo-foliations, a generalized type of foliation. The construction of non-manifold point neighborhoods is done to preserve as much of the geometric, and …

The goal of this paper is to develop some aspects of the deformation theory of piecewise flat structures on surfaces and use this theory to construct new geometric structures on the moduli space of Riemann surfaces.

The paper connects least area surfaces to quasi-normal surfaces in 3-manifolds.

We show that if X is a piecewise Euclidean 2-complex with a cocompact isometry group, then every 2-quasiflat in X is at finite Hausdorff distance from a subset which is locally flat outside a compact set, and asymptotically conical.

I study Gromov-Hausdorff limits of complex curves endowed with singular flat metrics of constant diameter. I formulate a criterion that the limit is collapsed in terms of a certain piecewise affine weight function on the dual intersection complex of a semi-stable model of the degeneration introduced by Kontsevich and S…

We define a discrete Laplace-Beltrami operator for simplicial surfaces. It depends only on the intrinsic geometry of the surface and its edge weights are positive. Our Laplace operator is similar to the well known finite-elements Laplacian (the so called ``cotan formula'') except that it is based on the intrinsic Delau…

We show that there exist non-trivial piecewise-linear (PL) knots with isolated singularities $S^{n-2}\subset S^n$, $n\geq 5$, whose complements have the homotopy type of a circle. This is in contrast to the case of smooth, PL locally-flat, and topological locally-flat knots, for which it is known that if the complement…

We demonstrate new applications of the trace embedding lemma to the study of piecewise-linear surfaces and the detection of exotic phenomena in dimension four. We provide infinitely many pairs of homeomorphic 4-manifolds $W$ and $W'$ homotopy equivalent to $S^2$ which have smooth structures distinguished by several for…

The classical knot groups are the fundamental groups of the complements of smooth or piecewise-linear (PL) locally-flat knots. For PL knots that are not locally-flat, there is a pair of interesting groups to study: the fundamental group of the knot complement and that of the complement of the ``boundary knot'' that occ…

We study the problem of approximating a surface $F$ in $R^3$ by a high quality mesh, a piecewise-flat triangulated surface whose triangles are as close as possible to equilateral. The MidNormal algorithm generates a triangular mesh that is guaranteed to have angles in the interval $[49.1^o, 81.8^o]$. As the mesh size $…

Simplifies PLNNs to interpretable models for better explainability.

We announce results about flat (linkless) embeddings of graphs in 3-space. A piecewise-linear embedding of a graph in 3-space is called {\it flat} if every circuit of the graph bounds a disk disjoint from the rest of the graph. We have shown: (i) An embedding is flat if and only if the fundamental group of the compleme…

These lectures were a part of the geometry course held during the Fall 2011 Mathematics Advanced Study Semesters (MASS) Program at Penn State (\url{http://www.math.psu.edu/mass/}). The lectures are meant to be accessible to advanced undergraduate and early graduate students in mathematics. We have placed a great emphas…

The paper studies which branched covers can be lifted to braided embeddings.

In [7], a notion of constant scalar curvature metrics on piecewise flat manifolds is defined. Such metrics are candidates for canonical metrics on discrete manifolds. In this paper, we define a class of vertex transitive metrics on certain triangulations of $\mathbb{S}^3$; namely, the boundary complexes of cyclic polyt…

Kirigami-inspired math reveals shortest paths and ultimate shapes of cut paper.

Thurston conjectured that a closed triangulated 3-manifold in which every edge has degree 5 or 6, and no two edges of degree 5 lie in a common 2-cell, has word-hyperbolic fundamental group. We establish Thurston's conjecture by proving that such a manifold admits a piecewise Euclidean metric of non-positive curvature a…

The paper extends Siegel-Veech formula to convex flat cone spheres.

We explicitly compute the limiting gap distribution for slopes of saddle connections on the flat surface associated to the regular octagon with opposite sides identified. This is the first such computation where the Veech group of the translation surface has multiple cusps. We also show how to parametrize a Poincaré se…

Let $\widehat{\mathcal{C}}_{\mathbb{Z}}$ denote the group of knots in homology spheres that bound homology balls, modulo smooth concordance in homology cobordisms. Answering a question of Matsumoto, the second author previously showed that the natural map from the smooth knot concordance group $\mathcal{C}$ to $\wideha…

We reparametrize ReLU NNs as splines to understand their learning dynamics.

We use partial actions, as formalized by Exel, to construct various commensurating actions. We use this in the context of groups piecewise preserving a geometric structure, and we interpret the transfixing property of these commensurating actions as the existence of a model for which the group acts preserving the geome…

The paper calculates volumes of moduli spaces of flat metrics on spheres with specific angles.

Neural networks can represent complex piecewise functions efficiently.

Theorem proves integrability for piecewise-smooth distributions.

We study the differential geometric consequences of our previous result on the existence of fat triangulations, in conjunction with a result of Cheeger, Müller and Schrader, regarding the convergence of Lipschitz-Killing curvatures of piecewise-flat approximations of smooth Riemannian manifolds. A further application t…

Study geometrically characterizes piecewise circular curves with decreasing curvature.

The center of a quotient group of piecewise linear homeomorphisms is trivial.

It is shown that for any piecewise-linear closed orientable manifold of odd dimension there exists an invariantly defined metric on the determinant line of cohomology with coefficients in an arbitrary flat bundle E over the manifold (E is not required to be unimodular). The construction of this metric (called Poincare …

GraN-GAN normalizes gradients for better GAN performance.

The paper extends a variance gamma model to quadratic functions, reducing arbitrage and computational costs.

This article provides an attempt to extend concepts from the theory of Riemannian manifolds to piecewise linear spaces. In particular we propose an analogue of the Ricci tensor, which we give the name of an Einstein vector field. On a given set of piecewise linear spaces we define and discuss (normalized) Ricci flows. …

We show that all finite-dimensional resolvable generalized manifolds with the piecewise disjoint arc-disk property are codimension one manifold factors. We then show how the piecewise disjoint arc-disk property and other general position properties that detect codimension one manifold factors are related. We also note …