Sharp Lp affine isoperimetric inequalities are established for the entire class of Lp projection bodies and the entire class of Lp centroid bodies. These new inequalities strengthen the Lp Petty projection and the Lp Busemann–Petty centroid inequality.

We discuss a sharp lower bound for the first positive eigenvalue of the sublaplacian on a closed, strictly pseudoconvex pseudohermitian manifold of dimension 2m + 1 ≥ 5. We prove that the equality holds iff the manifold is equivalent to the CR sphere up to a scaling. For this purpose, we establish an Obata-type theorem in CR geometry that characterizes the CR sphere in terms of a nonzero function satisfying a certain overdetermined system. Similar results are proved in dimension 3 under an additional condition.

In this paper, we establish a Bochner-type formula on Alexandrov spaces with Ricci curvature bounded below. Yau’s gradient estimate for harmonic functions is also obtained on Alexandrov spaces.

We show that for every simple closed curve , the extremal length and the hyperbolic length of  are quasi-convex functions along any Teichm¨uller geodesic. As a corollary, we conclude that, in Teichm¨uller space equipped with the Teichm¨uller metric, balls are quasi-convex.

We study harmonic maps from an admissible flat simplicial complex to a non-positively curved Riemannian manifold. Our main regularity theorem is that these maps are C1, at the interfaces of the top-dimensional simplices in addition to satisfying a balancing condition. If we assume that the domain is a 2-complex,then these maps are C1. As an application, we show that the regularity, the balancing condition and a Bochner formula lead to rigidity and vanishing theorems for harmonic maps. Furthermore, we give an explicit relationship between our techniques and those obtained via combinatorial methods.