Milazzo Harbour Project: Pier Regeneration Plan and Cable Car Scheme

This urban regeneration project for the city of Milazzo, Sicily was initiated by the Cittá di Milazzo under the European Union PIST-PISU (Piani integrati di sviluppo territorial & Piani integrati di sviluppo urbano) programme in 2010. It entailed two related urban design proposals: one for a decommissioned military pier and one that connected the historical Castello di Milazzo and the city’s western beaches. Both were vital to the future economy of the city. The primary research questions addressed by the project were: How can new urban connections and relationships be structured? How can the city’s waterfront be revitalised? How can the economic life of the city be extended into the winter months, and what are the pedagogical values of involving students in real projects? The project started with a five-day design workshop in Milazzo in February 2010, in which six postgraduate students from the University of Westminster participated. This concluded with a short presentation of sketch urban propositions. The London and Messina offices of Urban Future Organization, led by Andrew Yau, continued to develop the work with close dialogue with the city administration. The project was awarded an Education Award from Quadrante di Architettura in Italy in September 2010

Messina Waterfront Masterplan and Polycentre

The Messina Waterfront Masterplan and Polycentre is a two-stage competition winning design for Messina, Sicily undertaken by Urban Future Organisation in association with urban consultants Camerana and Associates and Favero e Milan Engineering, with Andrew Yau as lead designer. The project addressed a number of critical questions facing historic Mediterranean coastal cities. These included: How can sustainable social and economic urban development be stimulated in balance with the sea and natural environment? How can sustainable social and economic urban development be stimulated without undermining a city’s historic identity? How can existing urban culture and ways of life be enhanced? and How can a Mediterranean climate be maximized for day lighting, ventilation and energy harvesting? The core of the design approach was the development of four layered urban fields incorporating environmental strategies to engage with and extend the existing city. These were an infrastructural system of urban parks and natural-recreational attractors, green residential and commercial interventions, public spaces at a pedestrian scale and a new coastal field. This was strategically completed with a multi-functional Polycentre next to the archaeological remains of the 17th century La Real Cittadella and Bastion Santo Stefano. The project is currently awaiting the finalisation of geological surveys before going into the next phase of implementation

Representations of hom-Lie algebras

In this paper, we study representations of hom-Lie algebras. In particular, the adjoint representation and the trivial representation of hom-Lie algebras are studied in detail. Derivations, deformations, central extensions and derivation extensions of hom-Lie algebras are also studied as an application.Comment: 16 pages, multiplicative and regular hom-Lie algebras are used, Algebra and Representation Theory, 15 (6) (2012), 1081-109

Mirror Symmetry, Mirror Map and Applications to Complete Intersection Calabi-Yau Spaces

We extend the discussion of mirror symmetry, Picard-Fuchs equations, instanton-corrected Yukawa couplings, and the topological one-loop partition function to the case of complete intersections with higher-dimensional moduli spaces. We will develop a new method of obtaining the instanton-corrected Yukawa couplings through a close study of the solutions of the Picard-Fuchs equations. This leads to closed formulas for the prepotential for the K\"ahler moduli fields induced from the ambient space for all complete intersections in non singular weighted projective spaces. As examples we treat part of the moduli space of the phenomenologically interesting three-generation models that are found in this class. We also apply our method to solve the simplest model in which a topology change was observed and discuss examples of complete intersections in singular ambient spaces.Comment: 50 page

The Hoop Conjecture in Spherically Symmetric Spacetimes

We give general sufficient conditions for the existence of trapped surfaces due to concentration of matter in spherically symmetric initial data sets satisfying the dominant energy condition. These results are novel in that they apply and are meaningful for arbitrary spacelike slices, that is they do not require any auxiliary assumptions such as maximality, time-symmetry, or special extrinsic foliations, and most importantly they can easily be generalized to the nonspherical case once an existence theory for a modified version of the Jang equation is developed. Moreover, our methods also yield positivity and monotonicity properties of the Misner-Sharp energy

A Note on ODEs from Mirror Symmetry

We give close formulas for the counting functions of rational curves on complete intersection Calabi-Yau manifolds in terms of special solutions of generalized hypergeometric differential systems. For the one modulus cases we derive a differential equation for the Mirror map, which can be viewed as a generalization of the Schwarzian equation. We also derive a nonlinear seventh order differential equation which directly governs the instanton corrected Yukawa coupling.Comment: 24 pages using harvma