Compact locally maximal hyperbolic sets are studied via geometrically defined functional spaces that take advantage of the smoothness of the map in a neighborhood of the hyperbolic set. This provides a self-contained theory that not only reproduces all the known classical results, but also gives new insights on the statistical properties of these systems.

In this paper we prove that given a point p ∈ Mn, where Mn is a closed Riemannian manifold of dimension n, the length of a shortest geodesic loop lp(Mn) at this point is bounded above by 2nd, where d is the diameter of Mn. Moreover, we show that on a closed simply connected Riemannian manifold Mn with a nontrivial second homotopy group there either exist at least three geodesic loops of length less than or equal to 2d at each point of Mn, or the length of a shortest closed geodesic on Mn is bounded from above by 4d.

We show the regularity of, and derive a-priori estimates for (weakly) harmonic maps from a Riemannian manifold into a Euclidean sphere under the assumption that the image avoids some neighborhood of a half-equator. The proofs combine constructions of strictly convex functions and the regularity theory of quasilinear elliptic systems. We apply these results to the spherical and Euclidean Bernstein problems for minimal hypersurfaces, obtaining new conditions under which compact minimal hypersurfaces in spheres or complete minimal hypersurfaces in Euclidean spaces are trivial.

In this note we verify certain statement about the operator Q\_K constructed by Donaldson in [3] by using the full asymptotic expansion of Bergman kernel obtained in [2] and [4].

We prove, in the setting of a measure energy space (M, ,(, )), that if the smallest eigenvalue 1 () of the generator of the Dirichlet form in any precompact open set M admits the estimate 1 () ()- where is a measure absolutely continuous with respect to and > 0 then a similar estimate holds for the kth smallest eigenvalue: k () const (k/ ()) . As an application, we obtain an upper estimate of the stability index of a minimal surface in [inline-graphic xmlns: xlink=" http://www. w3. org/1999/xlink" xlink: href=" 01i"/] via the total curvature.