We investigate the minimal and isoperimetric surface problems in a large class of sub-Riemannian manifolds, the so-called Vertically Rigid spaces. We construct an adapted connection for such spaces and, using the variational tools of Bryant, Griffiths and Grossman, derive succinct forms of the Euler-Lagrange equations for critical points for the associated variational problems. Using the Euler-Lagrange equations, we show that minimal and isoperimetric surfaces satisfy a constant horizontal mean curvature conditions away from characteristic points. Moreover, we use the formalism to construct a horizontal second fundamental form, II0, for vertically rigid spaces and, as a first application, use II0 to show that minimal surfaces cannot have points of horizontal positive curvature and that minimal surfaces in Carnot groups cannot be locally strictly horizontally geometrically convex. We note that the convexity condition is distinct from others currently in the literature.

Inspired by the Gromov-Hausdorff distance, we define a new notion called the intrinsic flat distance between oriented m dimensional Riemannian manifolds with boundary by isometrically embedding the manifolds into a common metric space, measuring the flat distance between them and taking an infimum over all isometric embeddings and all common metric spaces. This is made rigorous by applying Ambrosio-Kirchheim’s extension of FedererFleming’s notion of integral currents to arbitrary metric spaces. We prove the intrinsic flat distance between two compact oriented Riemannian manifolds is zero iff they have an orientation preserving isometry between them. Using the theory of AmbrosioKirchheim, we study converging sequences of manifolds and their limits, which are in a class of metric spaces that we call integral current spaces. We describe the properties of such spaces including the fact that they are countably Hm rectifiable spaces and present numerous examples.

We prove the equivalence between some functional inequalities and the ultracontractivity property of the heat semigroup on infinite graphs. These functional inequalities include Sobolev inequalities, Nash inequalities, Faber–Krahn inequalities, and log-Sobolev inequalities. We also show that, under the assumptions of volume growth and CDE(n, 0), which is regarded as the natural notion of curvature on graphs, these four functional inequalities and the ultracontractivity property of the heat semigroup are all true on graphs.

We present an alternate description of the Ozsv´ath-Szab´o contact class in Heegaard Floer homology. Using our contact class, we prove that if a contact structure (M, ) has an adapted open book decomposition whose page S is a once-punctured torus, then the monodromy is right-veering if and only if the contact structure is tight.

We describe how to use the perturbation theory of Caffarelli to prove Evans-Krylov type $C^{2,\alpha}$ estimates for solutions of nonlinear elliptic equations in complex geometry, assuming a bound on the Laplacian of the solution. Our results can be used to replace the various Evans-Krylov type arguments in the complex geometry literature with a sharper and more unified approach. In addition, our methods extend to almost-complex manifolds, and we use this to obtain a new local estimate for an equation of Donaldson.