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.

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.

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We state and prove a Chern–Osserman-type inequality in terms of the volume growth for minimal surfaces$S$which have finite total extrinsic curvature and are properly immersed in a Cartan–Hadamard manifold$N$with sectional curvatures bounded from above by a negative quantity$K$_{$N$}≤$b$<0 and such that they are not too curved (on average) with respect to the hyperbolic space with constant sectional curvature given by the upper bound$b$. We also prove the same Chern–Osserman-type inequality for minimal surfaces with finite total extrinsic curvature and properly immersed in an asymptotically hyperbolic Cartan–Hadamard manifold$N$with sectional curvatures bounded from above by a negative quantity$K$_{$N$}≤$b$<0.

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.