The Ward equation, also called the modified 2+1 chiral model,is obtained by a dimension reduction and a gauge fixing from the self-dual Yang-Mills field equation on R2,2. It has a Lax pair and is an integrable system. Ward constructed solitons whose ex- tended solutions have distinct simple poles. He also used a limiting method to construct 2-solitons whose extended solutions have a double pole. Ioannidou and Zakrzewski, and Anand constructed more soliton solutions whose extended solutions have a double or triple pole. Some of the main results of this paper are: (i) We construct algebraic B¨acklund transformations (BTs) that generate new solutions of the Ward equation from a given one by an algebraic method. (ii) We use an order k limiting method and algebraic BTs to construct explicit Ward solitons, whose extended solutions have arbitrary poles and multiplicities. (iii) We prove that our construction gives all solitons of the Ward equation explicitly and the entries of Ward solitons must be rational functions in x, y and t. (iv) Since stationary Ward solitons are unitons, our method also gives an explicit construction of all k-unitons from finite sequences of rational maps from C to Cn.

Given an SO(3)-bundle with connection, the associated twosphere bundle carries a natural closed 2-form. Asking that this be symplectic gives a curvature inequality first considered by Reznikov [34]. We study this inequality in the case when the base has dimension four, with three main aims. Firstly, we use this approach to construct symplectic six-manifolds with c1 = 0 which are never K¨ahler; e.g., we produce such manifolds with b1 = 0 = b3 and also with c2 · [ω] < 0, answering questions posed by Smith–Thomas–Yau [37]. Examples come from Riemannian geometry, via the Levi–Civita connection on +. The underlying six-manifold is then the twistor space and often the symplectic structure tames the Eells–Salamon twistor almost complex structure. Our second aim is to exploit this to deduce new results about minimal surfaces: if a certain curvature inequality holds, it follows that the space of minimal surfaces (with fixed topological invariants) is compactifiable; the minimal surfaces must also satisfy an adjunction inequality, unifying and generalising results of Chen–Tian [6]. One metric satisfying the curvature inequality is hyperbolic four-space H4. Our final aim is to show that the corresponding symplectic manifold is symplectomorphic to the small resolution of the conifold xw −yz = 0 in C4. We explain how this fits into a hyperbolic description of the conifold transition, with isometries of H4 acting symplectomorphically on the resolution and isometries of H3 acting biholomorphically on the smoothing.

By studying the heat semigroup, we prove Li-Yau type estimates for bounded and positive solutions of the heat equation on graphs, under the assumption of the curvature-dimension inequality $CDE'(n,0)$, which can be consider as a notion of curvature for graphs. Furthermore, we derive that if a graph has non-negative curvature then it has the volume doubling property, from this we can prove the Gaussian estimate for heat kernel, and then Poincar\'{e} inequality and Harnack inequality. As a consequence, we obtain that the dimension of space of harmonic functions on graphs with polynomial growth is finite, which original is a conjecture of Yau on Riemannian manifold proved by Colding and Minicozzi. Under the assumption of positive curvature on graphs, we derive the Bonnet-Myers type theorem that the diameter of graphs is finite and bounded above in terms of the positive curvature by proving some Log Sobolev inequalities.

We propose to study the Hessian metric of given functional in the space of probability space embedded with L^2–Wasserstein (optimal transport) metric. We name it transport Hessian metric, which contains and extends the classical L^2–Wasserstein metric. We formulate several dynamical systems associated with transport Hessian metrics. Several connections between transport Hessian metrics and math physics equations are discovered. E.g., the transport Hessian gradient flow, including Newton’s flow, formulates a mean-field kernel Stein variational gradient flow; The transport Hessian Hamiltonian flow of negative Boltzmann-Shannon entropy forms the Shallow water’s equation; The transport Hessian gradient flow of Fisher information forms the heat equation. Several examples and closed-form solutions of finite-dimensional transport Hessian metrics and dynamics are presented.

We introduce the notion of Bonnet-Myers and Lichnerowicz sharpness in the Ollivier Ricci curvature sense. Our main result is a classification of all self-centered Bonnet-Myers sharp graphs (hypercubes, cocktail party graphs, even-dimensional demi-cubes, Johnson graphs , the Gosset graph J(2n, n) and suitable Cartesian products). We also present a purely combinatorial reformulation of this result. We show that Bonnet-Myers sharpness implies Lichnerowicz sharpness and classify all distance-regular Lichnerowicz sharp graphs under the additional condition θ_1=b_1-1. We also relate Bonnet-Myers sharpness to an upper bound of Bakry-Émery ∞-curvature, which motivates a general conjecture about Bakry-Émery ∞-curvature.