In a recent important breakthrough D. Christodoulou has solved a long standing problem of General Relativity of evolutionary formation of trapped surfaces in the Einstein-vacuum space-times. He has identified an open set of regular initial conditions on an outgoing null hypersurface (both finite and at past null infinity) leading to a formation a trapped surface in the corresponding vacuum space-time to the future of the initial outgoing hypersurface and another incoming null hypersurface with the prescribed Minkowskian data. In this paper we give a simpler proof for a finite problem by enlarging the admissible set of initial conditions and, consistent with this, relaxing the corresponding propagation estimates just enough that a trapped surface still forms. We also reduce the number of derivatives needed in the argument from two derivatives of the curvature to just one. More importantly, the proof, which can be easily localized with respect to angular sectors, has the potential for further developments.

This paper resolves a number of problems in the perturbation theory of linear operators, linked with the 45-year-old conjecure of M. G. Kreĭn. In particular, we prove that every Lipschitz function is operator-Lipschitz in the Schatten–von Neumann ideals$S$^{$α$}, 1 <$α$< ∞. Alternatively, for every 1 <$α$< ∞, there is a constant$c$_{$α$}> 0 such that $$ {\left\| {f(a) - f(b)} \right\|_{\alpha }} \leqslant {c_{\alpha }}{\left\| f \right\|_{{{\text{Lip}}\,{1}}}}{\left\| {a - b} \right\|_{\alpha }}, $$ where$f$is a Lipschitz function with $$ {\left\| f \right\|_{{{\text{Lip}}\,{1}}}}: = \mathop{{\sup }}\limits_{{_{{\lambda \ne \mu }}^{{\lambda, \mu \in \mathbb{R}}}}} \left| {\frac{{f\left( \lambda \right) - f\left( \mu \right)}}{{\lambda - \mu }}} \right| < \infty, $$ $$ {\left\| \cdot \right\|_{\alpha }} $$ is the norm is$S$^{$α$}, and$a$and$b$are self-adjoint linear operators such that $$ a - b \in {S^{\alpha }} $$ .

We prove a quantitative bi-Lipschitz non-embedding theorem for the Heisenberg group with its Carnot–Carathéodory metric and apply it to give a lower bound on the integrality gap of the Goemans–Linial semidefinite relaxation of the sparsest cut problem.

An analogue of the well-known $$ \frac{3}{{16}} $$ lower bound for the first eigenvalue of the Laplacian for a congruence hyperbolic surface is proven for a congruence tower associated with any non-elementary subgroup$L$of SL(2,$Z$). The proof in the case that the Hausdorff of the limit set of$L$is bigger than $$ \frac{1}{2} $$ is based on a general result which allows one to transfer such bounds from a combinatorial version to this archimedian setting. In the case that delta is less than $$ \frac{1}{2} $$ we formulate and prove a somewhat weaker version of this phenomenon in terms of poles of the corresponding dynamical zeta function. These “spectral gaps” are then applied to sieving problems on orbits of such groups.

We construct a conformally invariant random family of closed curves in the plane by welding of random homeomorphisms of the unit circle. The homeomorphism is constructed using the exponential of$βX$, where X is the restriction of the 2-dimensional free field on the circle and the parameter$β$is in the “high temperature” regime $$ \beta < \sqrt {2} $$ . The welding problem is solved by studying a non-uniformly elliptic Beltrami equation with a random complex dilatation. For the existence a method of Lehto is used. This requires sharp probabilistic estimates to control conformal moduli of annuli and they are proven by decomposing the free field as a sum of independent fixed scale fields and controlling the correlations of the complex dilatation restricted to dyadic cells of various scales. For the uniqueness we invoke a result by Jones and Smirnov on conformal removability of Hölder curves. Our curves are closely related to SLE($ϰ$) for$ϰ$<4.