arXiv subjects
Publications and source records attributed to David Glickenstein.
This paper uses the technology of weighted and regular triangulations to study discrete versions of the Laplacian on piecewise Euclidean manifolds. Regular triangulations are studied in some detail, including flip algorithms. The Laplacian is then studied as an operator on functions of the vertices as a generalized weighted Laplacian on graphs.
This article studies a discrete geometric structure on triangulated manifolds and an associated curvature flow (combinatorial Yamabe flow). The associated evolution of curvature appears to be like a heat equation on graphs, but it can be shown to not satisfy the maximum principle. The notion of a parabolic-like operator is introduced as an operator which satisfies the maximum principle, but may not be parabolic in the usual sense of operators on graphs. A maximum principle is derived for the curvature of combinatorial Yamabe flow under certain assumptions on the triangulation, and hence the heat operator is shown to be parabolic-like. The maximum principle then allows a characterization of the curvature as well was a proof of long term existence of the flow.
A combinatorial version of Yamabe flow is presented based on Euclidean triangulations coming from sphere packings. The evolution of curvature is then derived and shown to satisfy a heat equation. The Laplacian in the heat equation is shown to be a geometric analogue of the Laplacian of Riemannian geometry, although the maximum principle need not hold. It is then shown that if the flow is nonsingular, the flow converges to a constant curvature metric.
Consider a sequence of pointed n-dimensional complete Riemannian manifolds {(M_i,g_i(t), O_i)} such that t in [0,T] are solutions to the Ricci flow and g_i(t) have uniformly bounded curvatures and derivatives of curvatures. Richard Hamilton showed that if the initial injectivity radii are uniformly bounded below then there is a subsequence which converges to an n-dimensional solution to the Ricci flow. We prove a generalization of this theorem where the initial metrics may collapse. Without injectivity radius bounds we must allow for convergence in the Gromov-Hausdorff sense to a space which is not a manifold but only a metric space. We then look at the local geometry of the limit to understand how it relates to the Ricci flow.
We study sequences of 3-dimensional solutions to the Ricci flow with almost nonnegative sectional curvatures and diameters tending to infinity. Such sequences may arise from the limits of dilations about singularities of Type IIb. In particular, we study the case when the sequence collapses, which may occur when dilating about infinite time singularities. In this case we classify the possible Gromov-Hausdorff limits and construct 2-dimensional virtual limits. The virtual limits are constructed using Fukaya theory of the limits of local covers. We then show that the virtual limit arising from appropriate dilations of a Type IIb singularity is always Hamilton's cigar soliton solution.
Let (M,g) be a Riemannian manifold with an isometric action of the Lie group G. Let g_G be a left invariant metric on G. Consider the diagonal G action on the product $M \times G$ with the metric g+g_G. In this paper we calculate the formula for the metric h on the quotient space $(M \times G) / G$; the map from g to h is the metric transformation. In particular when g is the hyperbolic metric on H^2 and G=S^1, the transformed metric h is Hamilton's cigar soliton metric studied in the Ricci flow.