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This paper proves a 30 year old conjecture that disks and annuli are the only domains where analytic content - the uniform distance from $\bar{z}$ to analytic functions - achieves its lower bound. This problem is closely related to several well-known free boundary problems, in particular, Serrin's problem about laminar flow of incompressible viscous fluid for multiply-connected domains, and Garabedian's problem on the shape of electrified droplets. Some further ramifications and open questions, including extensions to higher dimensions, are also discussed.

In this note we extend the Gauss-Lucas theorem on the zeros of the derivative of a univariate polynomial to the case of sequences of univariate polynomials whose almost all zeros lie in a given convex bounded domain in C., Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures

A shape in the plane is an equivalence class of sufficiently smooth Jordan curves, where two curves are equivalent if one can be obtained from the other by a translation and a scaling. The fingerprint of a shape is an equivalence of orientation preserving diffeomorphisms of the unit circle, where two diffeomorphisms are equivalent if they differ by right composition with an automorphism of the unit disk. The fingerprint is obtained by composing Riemann maps onto the interior and exterior of a representative of a shape in a suitable way. In this paper, we show that there is a one-to-one correspondence between shapes defined by polynomial lemniscates of degree n and nth roots of Blaschke products of degree n. The facts that lemniscates approximate all Jordan curves in the Hausdorff metric and roots of Blaschke products approximate all orientation preserving diffeomorphisms of the circle in the C^1-norm suggest that lemniscates and roots of Blaschke products are natural objects to study in the theory of shapes and their fingerprints.

The large class of moving boundary processes in the plane modeled by the so-called Laplacian growth, which describes, e.g., solidification, electrodeposition, viscous fingering, bacterial growth, etc., is known to be integrable and to exhibit a large number of exact solutions. In this work, the boundaries are assumed to be in the class of lemniscates with all zeros inside the bounded component of the complex plane. We prove that for any initial boundary taken from this class, the evolving boundary instantly stops being in the class, or else Laplacian growth destroys lemniscates instantly.

In 1934 H. Malmheden discovered an elegant geometric algorithm for solving the Dirichlet problem in a ball. Although his result was rediscovered independently by Duffin 23 years later, it still does not seem to be widely known. In this paper we return to Malmheden's theorem, give an alternative proof of the result that allows generalization to polyharmonic functions and, also, discuss applications of his theorem to geometric properties of harmonic measures in balls in Euclidean spaces.

We discuss gravitational lensing by elliptical galaxies with some particular mass distributions. Using simple techniques from the theory of quadrature domains and the Schwarz function (cf. \cite{Sh}) we show that when the mass density is constant on confocal ellipses, the total number of lensed images of a point source cannot exceed 5 (4 bright images and 1 dim image). Also, using the Dive--Nikliborc converse of the celebrated Newton's theorem concerning the potentials of ellipsoids, we show that ``Einstein rings'' must always be either circles (in the absence of a tidal shear), or ellipses., Comment: 16 pages, 7 figures based on a pleanry talk at the international conference on analysis and mathematical physics "New Trends in Complex and Harmonic Analysis", May 7 - 12, 2007, Voss, Norway

We consider an inverse problem for the double layer potential which can be formulated, somewhat loosely, as follows. For which smoothly bounded domains D in Euclidian space does the operator J, which maps a function on the boundary to the boundary values of its double layer potential, admit the eigenvalue 1/2. The question is motivated by Fredholm's solution to the Dirichlet problem by means of the double layer potential.