No description available.

Ku Wah Kwan. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2004. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 61-64). / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / Chapter 1 --- Basic 3-Dimensional Contact Geometry --- p.5 / Chapter 1.1 --- Introduction --- p.5 / Chapter 1.2 --- Contact Structure --- p.7 / Chapter 1.3 --- Darboux's Theorem --- p.11 / Chapter 1.4 --- Characteristic Foliation --- p.13 / Chapter 1.5 --- More About S3 with The Standard Contact Structure --- p.16 / Chapter 2 --- Legendrian Knots --- p.18 / Chapter 2.1 --- Basic Definition --- p.18 / Chapter 2.2 --- Front Projection --- p.19 / Chapter 2.3 --- Classical Legendrian Knot Invariants --- p.22 / Chapter 2.3.1 --- Thurston-Bennequin Invariant --- p.22 / Chapter 2.3.2 --- Rotation Number --- p.23 / Chapter 2.4 --- Stabilization --- p.24 / Chapter 3 --- Convex Surface Theory --- p.26 / Chapter 3.1 --- Contact Vector Field --- p.26 / Chapter 3.2 --- Convex Surfaces --- p.29 / Chapter 3.3 --- Flexibility of Characteristic Foliation --- p.34 / Chapter 3.4 --- Bennequin Inequality --- p.36 / Chapter 3.5 --- Bypass --- p.38 / Chapter 3.5.1 --- Modification of Dividing Curves through Bypass --- p.39 / Chapter 3.5.2 --- Relation of Bypass and Stabilizing Disk --- p.40 / Chapter 3.5.3 --- Finding Bypass --- p.40 / Chapter 3.6 --- Tight Contact Structures on Solid Tori --- p.41 / Chapter 4 --- Classification Results --- p.42 / Chapter 4.1 --- Unknot --- p.43 / Chapter 4.2 --- Positive Torus Knot --- p.45 / Chapter 5 --- Transverse Knots --- p.50 / Chapter 5.1 --- Basic Definition --- p.50 / Chapter 5.2 --- Self-linking Number --- p.54 / Chapter 5.3 --- Relation between Transverse Knot and Legendrian Knot --- p.55 / Chapter 5.4 --- Classification of Unknot and Torus Knot --- p.57 / Chapter 6 --- Recent Development --- p.60 / Bibliography --- p.61

No description available.

No description available.

Graduation date: 1998

Thesis--Auburn University, 2009. / Abstract. Includes bibliographic references (p.70-72).

No description available.

No description available.

Surface fitting methods play an important role in many scientific fields as well as in computer aided geometric design. The problem treated here is that of constructing a smooth surface that interpolates data values associated with scattered nodes in the plane. The data is said to be convex if there exists a convex interpolant. The problem of convexity-preserving interpolation is to determine if the data is convex, and construct a convex interpolant if it exists.

This paper contains four main ideas. First, it shows global existence for the steepest descent in the uniformly convex setting. Secondly, it shows existence of critical points for convex functions defined on uniformly convex spaces. Thirdly, it shows an isomorphism between the dual space of H^{1,p}[0,1] and the space H^{1,q}[0,1] where p > 2 and {1/p} + {1/q} = 1. Fourthly, it shows how the Beurling-Denny theorem can be extended to find a useful function from H^{1,p}[0,1] to L_{p}[1,0] where p > 2 and addresses the problem of using that function to establish a relationship between the ordinary and the Sobolev gradients. The paper contains some numerical experiments and two computer codes.