We study a combinatorial problem that recently arose in the context of shape optimization: among all triangles with vertices $(0,0)$, $(x,0)$, and $(0,y)$ and fixed area, which one encloses the most lattice points from $\mathbb{Z}_{{>}0}^{2}$? Moreover, does its shape necessarily converge to the isosceles triangle $(x=y)$ as the area becomes large? Laugesen and Liu suggested that, in contrast to similar problems, there might not be a limiting shape. We prove that the limiting set is indeed non-trivial and contains infinitely many elements. We also show that there exist “bad” areas where no triangle is particularly good at capturing lattice points and show that there exists an infinite set of slopes $y/x$ such that any associated triangle captures more lattice points than any other fixed triangle for infinitely many (and arbitrarily large) areas; this set of slopes is a fractal subset of $[1/3,3]$ and has Minkowski dimension of at most $3/4$.

We consider boundedness of a certain positive dyadic operator

$$\begin{eqnarray}T^{\unicode[STIX]{x1D70E}}:L^{p}(\unicode[STIX]{x1D70E};\ell ^{2})\rightarrow L^{p}(\unicode[STIX]{x1D714}),\end{eqnarray}$$

$L^{p}$

$T^{\unicode[STIX]{x1D70E}}$

$p\in [2,\infty )$

We analyse the behaviour of the spectrum of the system of Maxwell equations of electromagnetism, with rapidly oscillating periodic coefficients, subject to periodic boundary conditions on a “macroscopic” domain $(0,T)^{3},T>0.$ We consider the case where the contrast between the values of the coefficients in different parts of their periodicity cell increases as the period of oscillations $\unicode[STIX]{x1D702}$ goes to zero. We show that the limit of the spectrum as $\unicode[STIX]{x1D702}\rightarrow 0$ contains the spectrum of a “homogenized” system of equations that is solved by the limits of sequences of eigenfunctions of the original problem. We investigate the behaviour of this system and demonstrate phenomena not present in the scalar theory for polarized waves.