We study the symplectic structure of the holomorphic coadjoint orbits, generalizing a theorem of McDuff on the symplectic structure of Hermitian symmetric spaces of noncompact type.

We prove that a constrained Willmore immersion of a 2–torus into the conformal 4–sphere S4 is of “finite type”, that is, has a spectral curve of finite genus, or of “holomorphic type” which means that it is super conformal or Euclidean minimal with planar ends in R4 = S4\{1} for some point 1 2 S4 at infinity. This implies that all constrained Willmore tori in S4 can be constructed rather explicitly by methods of complex algebraic geometry. The proof uses quaternionic holomorphic geometry in combination with integrable systems methods similar to those of Hitchin’s approach [19] to the study of harmonic tori in S3.

Given a hyperbolic 3–manifold with torus boundary, we bound the change in volume under a Dehn filling where all slopes have length at least 2π. This result is applied to give explicit diagrammatic bounds on the volumes of many knots and links, as well as their Dehn fillings and branched covers. Finally, we use this result to bound the volumes of knots in terms of the coefficients of their Jones polynomials.

We prove the classical Yano-Obata conjecture by showing that the connected component of the group of h-projective transformations of a closed, connected Riemannian K¨ahler manifold consists of isometries unless the manifold is the complex projective space with the standard Fubini-Study metric (up to a constant).

We show that the dynamics of automorphisms on all projective complex manifolds X (of dimension 3, or of any dimension but assuming the Good Minimal Model Program or Mori’s Program) are canonically built up from the dynamics on just three types of projective complex manifolds: complex tori, weak Calabi-Yau manifolds and rationally connected manifolds. As a by-product, we confirm the conjecture of Guedj [20] for automorphisms on 3-dimensional projective manifolds, and also determine π1(X).