Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

We will define the sutured version of embedded contact homology for sutured contact 3-manifolds. After that, we will show that the sutured version of embedded contact homology of S^1\times D^2, equipped with 2n sutures of integral or infinite slope on the boundary, coincides with the sutured Floer homology.

We present new finite difference approximations for solving variational problems using the TV and Besov smoothness penalty functionals. The first approach reduces oversmoothing and anisotropy found in common discrete approximations of the TV functional. The second approach reduces the staircasing effect that arises from TV type smoothing. The algorithms converge and can be sped up using a multiscale algorithm. Numerical examples demonstrate both the qualitative and quantitative behavior of the solutions.

Toda proved in 1989 that the (discrete) polynomial time hierarchy, {\bf PH}, is contained in the class {\bf P}^{#\bf P}, namely the class of languages that can be decided by a Turing machine in polynomial time given access to an oracle with the power to compute a function in the counting complexity class #{\bf P}. This result which illustrates the power of counting is considered to be a seminal result in computational complexity theory. An analogous result in the complexity theory over the reals (in the sense of Blum-Shub-Smale real Turing machines) has been missing so far. We formulate and prove a real analogue of Toda's theorem. Unlike Toda's proof in the discrete case, which relied on sophisticated combinatorial arguments, our proof is topological in nature. (Joint work with Thierry Zell.)

Linear algebra method is a very useful method in combinatorics. Lovas Theorem (a very deep theorem about perfect graph) is proved by using this way. The idea is, if we want to come up with an upper bound on the size of a set of objects, associate them with elements in a vector space V of relatively low dimension, and show that these elements are linearly independent. Then we cannot have more objects in our set than the dimension of V. We will show we can use this way to solve some combinatorics problem, such as odd town problem and two-distance sets problem.