Riemannian geometry is characterized, and research is oriented towards and shaped by concepts (geodesics, connections, curvature,...) and objectives, in particular to understand certain classes of (compact) Riemannian manifolds defined by curvature conditions (constant or positive or negative curvature,...). By way of contrast, geometric analysis is a perhaps somewhat less systematic collection of techniques, for solving extremal problems naturally arising in geometry and for investigating and characterizing their solutions. It turns out that the two fields complement each other very well; geometric analysis offers tools for solving difficult problems in geometry, and Riemannian geometry stimulates progress in geometric analysis by setting ambitious goals.

These notions in the title are of fundamental importance in any branch of physics. However, there have been great difficulties in finding physically acceptable definitions of them in general relativity since Einstein's time. I shall explain these difficulties and progresses that have been made. In particular, I shall introduce new definitions of center of mass and angular momentum at both the quasi-local and total levels, which are derived from first principles in general relativity and by the method of geometric analysis. With these new definitions, the classical formula p=mv is shown to be consistent with Einstein's field equation for the first time. This paper is based on joint work [14][15] with Po-Ning Chen and Shing-Tung Yau.

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IT IS well-known that if a compact group acts differentiably on a differentiable manifold, then this group must preserve some Riemannian metric on this manifold. From this point of view, we shall discuss certain facts about group actions on manifolds. In 01, we study the group of isometries of a non-compact manifold. We discover that if the group is non-compact, the manifold has to split as a product of the Euclidean space and another manifold. This gives some information on problem 33 of [5]. It also gives some information on the group of biholomorphic transformations of a complex manifold whose Bergman metric is not trivial. Then we find a topological obstruction for a non-compact manifold to admit an infinite group to act freely and properly discontinuously. Namely, we prove that the natural map from the de Rham cohomology group with compact support to the de Rham cohomology group without compact support is trivial when the first group has finite dimension. In $2, we obtain some topological obstructions for group actions by looking at the complex of invariant differential forms. We prove, for example, that if a compact group acts on a compact manifold with non-zero Euler number, then wI A*** A ut+,= 0 for all closed invariant l-forms wl,..., Ok+ 1 with k 2 the codimension of the principle orbit.(It may be interesting to note that the vanishing is on the form level so that any secondary obstruction should also vanish.) We also prove a topological version of this theorem for circle actions. An interesting corollary is that if a manifold is the connected sum of a torus and a compact manifold with Euler number# 2, then it does not admit any circle actions