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.

After Bershadsky-Cecotti-Ooguri-Vafa, we introduce an invariant of Calabi-Yau threefolds, which we call the BCOV invariant and which we obtain using analytic torsion. We give an explicit formula for the BCOV invariant as a function on the compactified moduli space, when it is isomorphic to a projective line. As a corollary, we prove the formula for the BCOV invariant of quintic mirror threefolds conjectured by Bershadsky-Cecotti-Ooguri-Vafa.

We introduce singular Ricci flows, which are Ricci flow spacetimes subject to certain asymptotic conditions. These provide a solution to the long-standing problem of finding a good notion of Ricci flow through singularities, in the 3-dimensional case. We prove that Ricci flow with surgery, starting from a fixed initial condition, subconverges to a singular Ricci flow as the surgery parameter tends to zero. We establish a number of geometric and analytical properties of singular Ricci flows.

We study the asymptotic of the Bergman kernel of the spinc Dirac operator on high tensor powers of a line bundle.

We show that a properly immersed minimal hypersurface in M × R+ equals some M×{c} when M is a complete, recurrent ndimensional Riemannian manifold with bounded curvature. If on the other hand,M is not necessarily recurrent but has nonnegative Ricci curvature with curvature bounded below, the same result holds for any positive entire minimal graph over M.