Ricci flow deforms the Riemannian metric proportionally to the curvature, such that the curvature evolves according to a heat diffusion process and eventually becomes constant everywhere. Ricci flow has demonstrated its great potential by solving various problems in many fields, which can be hardly handled by alternative methods so far....
The Laplace-Beltrami operator of a smooth Riemannian manifold is determined by the Riemannian metric. Conversely, the heat kernel constructed from the eigenvalues and eigenfunctions of the Laplace-Beltrami operator determines the Riemannian metric. This work proves the analogy on Euclidean polyhedral surfaces (triangle meshes), that the discrete heat kernel and the...