In this paper we discuss the change in contact structures as their supporting open book decompositions have their binding components cabled. To facilitate this and applications we define the notion of a rational open book decomposition that generalizes the standard notion of open book decomposition and allows one to more easily study surgeries on transverse knots. As a corollary to our investigation we are able to show there are Stein fillable contact structures supported by open books whose monodromies cannot be written as a product of positive Dehn twists. We also exhibit several monoids in the mapping class group of a surface that have contact geometric significance.

We present an alternate description of the Ozsv´ath-Szab´o contact class in Heegaard Floer homology. Using our contact class, we prove that if a contact structure (M, ) has an adapted open book decomposition whose page S is a once-punctured torus, then the monodromy is right-veering if and only if the contact structure is tight.

Motivated by the recent work of Wu and Yau on the ampleness of canonical line bundle for compact K\"ahler manifolds with negative holomorphic sectional curvature, we introduce a new curvature notion called {\em real bisectional curvature} for Hermitian manifolds. When the metric is K\"ahler, this is just the holomorphic sectional curvature $H$, and when the metric is non-K\"ahler, it is slightly stronger than $H$. We classify compact Hermitian manifolds with constant non-zero real bisectional curvature, and also slightly extend Wu-Yau's theorem to the Hermitian case. The underlying reason for the extension is that the Schwarz lemma of Wu-Yau works the same when the target metric is only Hermitian but has nonpositive real bisectional curvature.

We describe how to use the perturbation theory of Caffarelli to prove Evans-Krylov type $C^{2,\alpha}$ estimates for solutions of nonlinear elliptic equations in complex geometry, assuming a bound on the Laplacian of the solution. Our results can be used to replace the various Evans-Krylov type arguments in the complex geometry literature with a sharper and more unified approach. In addition, our methods extend to almost-complex manifolds, and we use this to obtain a new local estimate for an equation of Donaldson.

The classical Minkowski formula is extended to spacelike codimension-two submanifolds in spacetimes which admit "hidden symmetry" from conformal Killing-Yano two-forms. As an application, we obtain an Alexandrov type theorem for spacelike codimension-two submanifolds in a static spherically symmetric spacetime: a codimension-two submanifold with constant normalized null expansion (null mean curvature) must lie in a shear-free (umbilical) null hypersurface. These results are generalized for higher order curvature invariants. In particular, the notion of mixed higher order mean curvature is introduced to highlight the special null geometry of the submanifold. Finally, Alexandrov type theorems are established for spacelike submanifolds with constant mixed higher order mean curvature, which are generalizations of hypersurfaces of constant Weingarten curvature in the Euclidean space.