For any Shimura variety of Hodge type with hyperspecial level at a prime $p$ and automorphic lisse sheaf on it, we prove a formula, conjectured by Kottwitz \cite{Kottwitz90}, for the Lefschetz numbers of Frobenius-twisted Hecke correspondences acting on the compactly supported \'etale cohomology. Our proof is an adaptation of the arguments of Langlands and Rapoport \cite{LR87} of deriving the Kottwitz's formula from their conjectural description of the set of mod-$p$ points of Shimura variety (Langlands-Rapoport conjecture), which replaces their Galois gerb theoretic arguments by more geometric ones. We also prove a generalization of Honda-Tate theorem in the context of Shimura varieties and fix an error in Kisin's work \cite{Kisin17}. We do not assume that the derived group is simply connected.

This paper explains the construction of all hypersurfaces with constant mean curvature -- cmc -- and exactly two principal curvatures on any space form endowed with a semi-riemannian metric. Here we will consider riemannian hypersurfaces as well as hypersurfaces with semi-riemannian metrics induced by the ambient space. We show explicit immersions for all these hypersurfaces. We will see that for any given ambient space, the family of cmc hypersurfaces with two principal curvatures depends on two parameters, $H$ and $C$. We describe the range for all possible $(H,C)$ associated with complete cmc hypersurfaces. We end the paper by finding optimal bounds for the traceless second fundamental form in terms of $H$ and $n$.

We investigate a homeomorphism problem on a class of self-similar sets called generalized Sierpiński carpets (or shortly GSCs). It follows from two well-known results by Hata and Whyburn that a connected GSC is homeomorphic to the standard Sierpiński carpet if and only if it has no local cut points. On the one hand, we show that to determine whether a given GSC is connected, it suffices to iterate the initial pattern twice. On the other hand, we obtain two criteria: (1) for a connected GSC to have cut points, (2) for a connected GSC with no cut points to have local cut points. With these two criteria, we characterize all GSCs that are homeomorphic to the standard Sierpiński carpet. Our results on cut points and local cut points hold for Barański carpets, too. Moreover, we extend the connectedness result to Barański sponges. Thus, we also characterize when a Barański carpet is homeomorphic to the standard GSC.