Let Sg be a closed surface of genus g and Mg be the moduli space of Sg endowed with the Weil–Petersson metric. In this article we investigate the Weil–Petersson curvatures of Mg for large genus g. First, we study the asymptotic behavior of the extremal Weil–Petersson holomorphic sectional curvatures at certain thick surfaces in Mg as g → ∞. Then we prove two curvature properties on the whole space Mg as g → ∞ in a probabilistic way.

We carry out the programme of R. Liouville [19] to construct an explicit local obstruction to the existence of a Levi–Civita connection within a given projective structure [..] on a surface. The obstruction is of order 5 in the components of a connection in a projective class. It can be expressed as a point invariant for a second order ODE whose integral curves are the geodesics of [..] or as a weighted scalar projective invariant of the projective class. If the obstruction vanishes we find the sufficient conditions for the existence of a metric in the real analytic case. In the generic case they are expressed by the vanishing of two invariants of order 6 in the connection. In degenerate cases the sufficient obstruction is of order at most 8.

In this paper, we give the sharp upper bound for the number of vertices with positive curvature in a planar graph with nonnegative combinatorial curvature. Based on this, we show that the automorphism group of a planar—possibly infinite—graph with nonnegative combinatorial curvature and positive total curvature is a finite group, and give an upper bound estimate for the order of the group.

Necessary and sufficient conditions for the discreteness of the Laplacian on a noncompact Riemannian manifold M are established in terms of the isocapacitary function of M. The relevant capacity takes a different form according to whether M has finite or infinite volume. Conditions involving the more standard isoperimetric function of M can also be derived, but they are only sufficient in general, as we demonstrate by concrete examples.

We prove several rigidity theorems for elliptic genera associated to Toeplitz operators on odd dimensional spin manifolds. We also prove an equivariant odd index theorem for Dirac operators with involution parity and the Atiyah-Hirzebruch vanishing theorems for odd dimensional spin manifolds.