Analytically exact spiral scheme for generating uniformly distributed points on the unit sphere

The problem of constructing a set of uniformly-distributed points on the surface of a sphere, also known as the Thomson problem, has a long and interesting history, which dates back to J.J. Thomson in 1904. A particular variant of the Thomson problem that is of great importance to biomedical imaging is that of generating a nearly uniform distribution of points on the sphere via a deterministic scheme. Although the point set generated through the minimization of electrostatic potential is the gold standard, minimizing the electrostatic potential of one thousand points (or charges) or more remains a formidable task. Therefore, a deterministic scheme capable of generating efficiently and accurately a set of uniformly-distributed points on the sphere has an important role to play in many scientific and engineering applications, not the least of which is to serve as an initial solution (with random perturbation) for the electrostatic repulsion scheme. In the work, we will present an analytically exact spiral scheme for generating a highly uniform distribution of points on the unit sphere.     

A simple scheme for generating nearly uniform distribution of antipodally symmetric points on the unit sphere

A variant of the Thomson problem, which is about placing a set of points uniformly on the surface of a sphere, is that of generating uniformly distributed points on the sphere that are endowed with antipodal symmetry, i.e., if x is an element of the point set then -x is also an element of that point set. Point sets with antipodal symmetry are of special importance to many scientific and engineering applications. Although this type of point sets may be generated through the minimization of a slightly modified electrostatic potential, the optimization procedure becomes unwieldy when the size of the point set increases beyond a few thousands. Therefore, it is desirable to have a deterministic scheme capable of generating this type of point set with near uniformity. In this work, we will present a simple deterministic scheme to generate nearly uniform point sets with antipodal symmetry.     

Lyapunov orbits in the n-vortex problem

In the reduced phase space by rotation, we prove the existence of periodic orbits of the n-vortex problem emanating from a relative equilibrium formed by n unit vortices at the vertices of a regular polygon, both in the plane and at a fixed latitude when the ideal fluid moves on the surface of a sphere. In the case of a plane we also prove the existence of such periodic orbits in the (n + 1)-vortex problem, where an additional central vortex of intensity κ is added to the ring of the polygonal configuration.     

Orientable and non-orientable director fields for liquid crystals

Uniaxial nematic liquid crystals are often modelled using the Oseen-Frank theory, in which the mean orientation of the rodlike molecules is described through a unit vector field n. This theory has the apparent drawback that it does not respect the head-to-tail symmetry in which n should be equivalent to −n; that is, instead of n taking values in the unit sphere 𝕊², it should take values in the sphere with opposite points identified, i.e. in the real projective plane ℝP². The Landau-de Gennes theory respects this symmetry by working with the tensor Q = s (n ⊗ n − ⅓Id). In the case of a non-zero constant scalar order parameter s the Landau-de Gennes theory is equivalent to that of Oseen-Frank when the director field is orientable. We report on a general study of when the director fields can be oriented, described in terms of the topology of the domain filled by the liquid crystal, the boundary data and the Sobolev space to which Q belongs. We also analyze the circumstances in which the non-orientable configurations are energetically favoured over the orientable ones. (© 2008 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)     

Arbitrary-norm separating plane

A plane separating two point sets in n-dimensional real space is constructed such that it minimizes the sum of arbitrary-norm distances of misclassified points to the plane. In contrast to previous approaches that used surrogates for distance-minimization, the present work is based on a precise norm-dependent explicit closed form for the projection of a point on a plane. This projection is used to formulate the separating-plane problem as a minimization of a convex function on a unit sphere in a norm dual to that of the arbitrary norm used. For the 1-norm, the problem can be solved in polynomial time by solving 2n linear programs or by solving a bilinear program. For a general p-norm, the minimization problem can be transformed via an exact penalty formulation to minimizing the sum ofa convex function and a bilinear function on a convex set. For the one and infinity norms, a finite successive linearization algorithm can be used for solving the exact penalty formulation.     

Extremal problems for the central projection

We consider area minimizing problems for the image of a closed subset in the unit sphere under a projection from the center of the sphere to a tangent plane, the central projection. We show, for any closed subset in the sphere, the uniqueness of a tangent plane that minimizes the area, and then the minimality of the spherical discs among closed subsets with the same spherical area.     

The size of a Minkowski ellipse that contains the unit ball

In this paper we study the minimum radius of Minkowski ellipses (with antipodal foci on the unit sphere) necessary to contain the unit ball of a (normed or) Minkowski plane. We obtain a general upper bound depending on the modulus of convexity, and in the special case of a so-called symmetric Minkowski plane (a notion that we will recall in the paper) we prove a lower bound, and also we obtain that 3 is the exact upper bound.     

The Brownian map is the scaling limit of uniform random plane quadrangulations

We prove that uniform random quadrangulations of the sphere with n faces, endowed with the usual graph distance and renormalized by n ^?1/4, converge as n → ∞ in distribution for the Gromov–Hausdorff topology to a limiting metric space. We validate a conjecture by Le Gall, by showing that the limit is (up to a scale constant) the so-called Brownian map, which was introduced by Marckert–Mokkadem and Le Gall as the most natural candidate for the scaling limit of many models of random plane maps. The proof relies strongly on the concept of geodesic stars in the map, which are configurations made of several geodesics that only share a common endpoint and do not meet elsewhere.     

Hopf bifurcations from relative equilibria in spherical geometry

Resonant and nonresonant Hopf bifurcations from relative equilibria posed in two spatial dimensions, in systems with Euclidean SE(2) symmetry, have been extensively studied in the context of spiral waves in a plane and are now well understood. We investigate Hopf bifurcations from relative equilibria posed in systems with compact SO(3) symmetry where SO(3) is the group of rotations in three dimensions/on a sphere. Unlike the SE(2) case the skew product equations cannot be solved directly and we use the normal form theory due to Fiedler and Turaev to simplify these systems. We show that the normal form theory resolves the nonresonant case, but not the resonant case. New methods developed in this paper combined with the normal form theory resolves the resonant case.     

A generalization of the Poisson integral formula for the functions harmonic and biharmonic in a ball

We construct an analytic solution to the problem of extension to the unit N-dimensional ball of the potential on its values on an interior sphere. The formula generalizes the conventional Poisson formula. Bavrin’s results obtained for the two-dimensional case by methods of function theory are transferred to the N-dimensional case (N ≥ 3). We also exhibit a solution to a similar extension problem for some operator expressions depending on a potential known on an interior sphere. A connection is established between solutions to the moment problem on a segment and on a semiaxis.     

Closed-Loop Control of the Motion of a Sphere Rolling on a Moving Horizontal Plane

A uniform sphere is rolling without slipping on a horizontal plane. The motion of the sphere is controlled via the control of the acceleration of the plane. At the time t=0, the sphere and the plane are stationary and the center of the sphere is located at a point A in the plane. Given a time interval [0, t _f], the problem dealt with here is: Find a closed-loop strategy for the acceleration of the moving plane such that, at the time t=t _f, the plane and the sphere will be nearly at rest and the center of the sphere will be in a given neighborhood of the origin. By introducing the concept of path controllability, a closed-loop strategy for the solution of the above-mentioned problem is proposed and its efficiency is demonstrated by solving numerically some examples.     

Fast integral equation methods for the Laplace-Beltrami equation on the sphere

Integral equation methods for solving the Laplace-Beltrami equation on the unit sphere in the presence of multiple “islands” are presented. The surface of the sphere is first mapped to a multiply-connected region in the complex plane via a stereographic projection. After discretizing the integral equation, the resulting dense linear system is solved iteratively using the fast multipole method for the 2D Coulomb potential in order to calculate the matrix-vector products. This numerical scheme requires only O(N) operations, where N is the number of nodes in the discretization of the boundary. The performance of the method is demonstrated on several examples.     

A fascinating polynomial sequence arising from an electrostatics problem on the sphere

A positive unit point charge approaching from infinity a perfectly spherical isolated conductor carrying a total charge of +1 will eventually cause a negatively charged spherical cap to appear. The determination of the smallest distance ρ(d) (d is the dimension of the unit sphere) from the point charge to the sphere where still all of the sphere is positively charged is known as Gonchar’s problem. Using classical potential theory for the harmonic case, we show that 1+ρ(d) is equal to the largest positive zero of a certain sequence of monic polynomials of degree 2d?1 with integer coefficients which we call Gonchar polynomials. Rather surprisingly, ρ(2)?is the Golden ratio and ρ(4) the lesser known Plastic number. But Gonchar polynomials have other interesting properties. We discuss their factorizations, investigate their zeros and present some challenging conjectures.     

Minimizing configurations and Hamilton-Jacobi equations of homogeneous N-body problems

For N-body problems with homogeneous potentials we define a special class of central configurations related with the reduction of homotheties in the study of homogeneous weak KAM solutions. For potentials in 1/r ^α with α ∈ (0, 2) we prove the existence of homogeneous weak KAM solutions. We show that such solutions are related to viscosity solutions of another Hamilton-Jacobi equation in the sphere of normal configurations. As an application we prove for the Newtonian three-body problem that there are no smooth homogeneous solutions to the critical Hamilton-Jacobi equation.     

A topological characterization of the ω-limit sets for analytic flows on the plane, the sphere and the projective plane

In this paper the ω-limit sets for analytic and polynomial differential equations on the plane are characterized up to homeomorphisms. The analogous problem is solved in full detail for analytic flows on the sphere and the projective plane. We also explain how to carry on the same program for analytic flows defined on open subsets of these surfaces.     

First order hermite interpolation with spherical Pythagorean-hodograph curves

The general stereographic projection which maps a point on a sphere with arbitrary radius to a point on a plane stereographically and its inverse projection have the Pythagorean-hodograph (PH) preserving property in the sense that they map a PH curve to another PH curve. Upon this fact, for given spatialC ¹ Hermite data, we construct a spatial PH curve on a sphere that is aC ¹ Hermite interpolant of the given data as follows: First, we solveC ¹ Hermite interpolation problem for the stereographically projected planar data of the given data in ?³ with planar PH curves expressed in the complex representation. Second, we construct spherical PH curves which are interpolants for the given data in ?³ using the inverse general stereographic projection.     

Bounds for solid angles of lattices of rank three

We find sharp absolute constants C₁ and C₂ with the following property: every well-rounded lattice of rank 3 in a Euclidean space has a minimal basis so that the solid angle spanned by these basis vectors lies in the interval [C₁,C₂]. In fact, we show that these absolute bounds hold for a larger class of lattices than just well-rounded, and the upper bound holds for all. We state a technical condition on the lattice that may prevent it from satisfying the absolute lower bound on the solid angle, in which case we derive a lower bound in terms of the ratios of successive minima of the lattice. We use this result to show that among all spherical triangles on the unit sphere in RN with vertices on the minimal vectors of a lattice, the smallest possible area is achieved by a configuration of minimal vectors of the (normalized) face centered cubic lattice in R³. Such spherical configurations come up in connection with the kissing number problem.     

Constructing 5-chromatic unit distance graphs embedded in the Euclidean plane and two-dimensional spheres

This paper is devoted to the development of algorithms for finding unit distance graphs with chromatic number greater than 4, embedded in a two-dimensional sphere or plane. Such graphs provide a lower bound for the Hadwiger–Nelson problem on the chromatic number of the plane and its generalizations to the case of the sphere. A series of 5-chromatic unit distance graphs on 64513 vertices embedded into the plane is constructed. Unlike previously known examples, these graphs do not use the Moser spindle as the base element. The construction of 5-chromatic graphs embedded in a sphere at two values of the radius is given. Namely, the 5-chromatic unit distance graph on 372 vertices embedded into the circumsphere of an icosahedron with a unit edge length, and the 5-chromatic graph on 972 vertices embedded into the circumsphere of a great icosahedron are constructed.