We study geodesics in the random metric space called the Brownian map, which appears as the scaling limit of large planar maps. In particular, we completely describe geodesics starting from the distinguished point called the root, and we characterize the set$S$of all points that are connected to the root by more than one geodesic. The set$S$is dense in the Brownian map and homeomorphic to a non-compact real tree. Furthermore, for every$x$in$S$, the number of distinct geodesics from x to the root is equal to the number of connected components of$S$\{$x$}. In particular, points of the Brownian map can be connected to the root by at most three distinct geodesics. Our results have applications to the behavior of geodesics in large planar maps.

We prove the endpoint case of the multilinear Kakeya conjecture of Bennett, Carbery and Tao. The proof uses the polynomial method introduced by Dvir.

We define non-pluripolar products of an arbitrary number of closed positive (1, 1)-currents on a compact Kähler manifold$X$. Given a big (1, 1)-cohomology class$α$on$X$(i.e. a class that can be represented by a strictly positive current) and a positive measure$μ$on$X$of total mass equal to the volume of$α$and putting no mass on pluripolar sets, we show that$μ$can be written in a unique way as the top-degree self-intersection in the non-pluripolar sense of a closed positive current in$α$. We then extend Kolodziedj’s approach to sup-norm estimates to show that the solution has minimal singularities in the sense of Demailly if$μ$has$L$^{1+$ε$}-density with respect to Lebesgue measure. If$μ$is smooth and positive everywhere, we prove that$T$is smooth on the ample locus of$α$provided$α$is nef. Using a fixed point theorem, we finally explain how to construct singular Kähler–Einstein volume forms with minimal singularities on varieties of general type.

We introduce canonical antisymmetric quasiconformal maps, which minimize the quasiconformality constant among maps sending the unit circle to a given quasicircle. As an application we prove Astala’s conjecture that the Hausdorff dimension of a$k$-quasicircle is at most 1+$k$^{2}.

We introduce the$generic central character$of an irreducible discrete series representation of an affine Hecke algebra. Using this invariant we give a new classification of the irreducible discrete series characters for all abstract affine Hecke algebras (except for the types ${E_{n}^{(1)}}$ , n=6, 7, 8) with$arbitrary positive parameters$and we prove an explicit product formula for their formal degrees (in all cases).