Evolving smooth, compact hypersurfaces in Rn+1 with normal speed equal to a positive power k of the mean curvature improves a certain ‘isoperimetric difference’ for k > n.1. As singularities may develop before the volume goes to zero, we develop a weak level-set formulation for such flows and show that the above monotonicity is still valid. This proves the isoperimetric inequality for n 6 7. Extending this to complete, simply connected 3-dimensional manifolds with nonpositive sectional curvature, we give a new proof for the Euclidean isoperimetric inequality on such manifolds.

Making use of the extended flux homomorphism defined in [13] on the group Symp§g of symplectomorphisms of a closed ori- ented surface §g of genus g ≥ 2, we introduce new characteristic classes of foliated surface bundles with symplectic, equivalently area-preserving, total holonomy. These characteristic classes are stable with respect to g and we show that they are highly non- trivial. We also prove that the second homology of the group Ham§g of Hamiltonian symplectomorphisms of §g, equipped with the discrete topology, is very large for all g ≥ 2.

This article studies the geometry of moduli spaces of G2-manifolds, associative cycles, coassociative cycles and deformed Donaldson–Thomas bundles. We introduce natural symmetric cubic tensors and differential forms on these moduli spaces. They correspond to Yukawa couplings and correlation functions in M-theory. We expect that the Yukawa coupling characterizes (co-)associative fibrations on these manifolds. We discuss the Fourier transformation along such fibrations and the analog of the Strominger–Yau–Zaslow mirror conjecture for G2-manifolds. We also discuss similar structures and transformations for Spin(7)- manifolds.

We prove that if a complete, properly embedded, finite-topology minimal surface in S2×R contains a line, then its ends are asymptotic to helicoids, and that if the surface is an annulus, it must be a helicoid.

Ricci flow deforms the Riemannian metric proportionally to the curvature, such that the curvature evolves according to a heat diffusion process and eventually becomes constant everywhere. Ricci flow has demonstrated its great potential by solving various problems in many fields, which can be hardly handled by alternative methods so far.