We review some recent results on the mean curvature flows of Lagrangian submanifolds from the perspective of geometric partial differential equations. These include global existence and convergence results, characterizations of first-time singularities, and constructions of self-similar solutions.

In this paper we prove a monotonicity formula for the integral of the mean curvature for complete and proper hypersurfaces of the hyperbolic space and, as consequences, we obtain a lower bound for the integral of the mean curvature and that the integral of the mean curvature is infinity.

We discuss a sharp lower bound for the first positive eigenvalue of the sublaplacian on a closed, strictly pseudoconvex pseudohermitian manifold of dimension 2m + 1 ≥ 5. We prove that the equality holds iff the manifold is equivalent to the CR sphere up to a scaling. For this purpose, we establish an Obata-type theorem in CR geometry that characterizes the CR sphere in terms of a nonzero function satisfying a certain overdetermined system. Similar results are proved in dimension 3 under an additional condition.

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The universal Teichmu¨ller space is an infinitely dimensional generalization of the classical Teichmu¨ller space of Riemann surfaces. It carries a natural Hilbert structure, on which one can define a natural Riemannian metric, the Weil-Petersson metric. In this paper we investigate the Weil-Petersson Riemannian curvature operator ˜ Q of the universal Teichmu¨ller space with the Hilbert structure, and prove the following: (i) ˜ Q is non-positive definite. (ii) ˜ Q is a bounded operator. (iii) ˜ Q is not compact; the set of the spectra of ˜ Q is not discrete. As an application, we show that neither the Quaternionic hyperbolic space nor the Cayley plane can be totally geodesically immersed in the universal Teichmu¨ller space endowed with the Weil-Petersson metric.