We construct noncompact solutions to the affine normal flow of hypersurfaces, and show that all ancient solutions must be either ellipsoids (shrinking solitons) or paraboloids (translating solitons). We also provide a new proof of the existence of a hyperbolic affine sphere asymptotic to the boundary of a convex cone containing no lines, which is originally due to Cheng-Yau. The main techniques are local second-derivative estimates for a parabolic Monge-Amp`ere equation modeled on those of Ben Andrews and Guti´errez-Huang, a decay estimate for the cubic form under the affine normal flow due to Ben Andrews, and a hypersurface barrier due to Calabi.

A version of the Donaldson-Thomas invariants of a Calabi-Yau threefold is proposed as a conjectural mathematical definition of the Gopakumar-Vafa invariants. These invariants have a local version, which is verified to satisfy the required properties for contractible curves. This provides a new viewpoint on the computation of the local Gromov-Witten invariants of contractible curves by Bryan, Leung, and the author.

It is shown that within the Lp-Brunn–Minkowski theory that Aleksandrov’s integral curvature has a natural Lp extension, for all real p. This raises the question of finding necessary and sufficient conditions on a given measure in order for it to be the Lp-integral curvature of a convex body. This problem is solved for positive p and is answered for negative p provided the given measure is even.

We investigate the Kähler-Ricci flow on holomorphic fiber spaces whose generic fiber is a Calabi-Yau manifold. We establish uniform metric convergence to a metric on the base, away from the singular fibers, and show that the rescaled metrics on the fibers converge to Ricci-flat Kähler metrics. This strengthens previous work of Song-Tian and others. We obtain analogous results for degenerations of Ricci-flat Kähler metrics.

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.