We give a description of the completion of the manifold of all smooth Riemannian metrics on a fixed smooth, closed, finitedimensional, orientable manifold with respect to a natural metric called the L2 metric. The primary motivation for studying this problem comes from Teichm¨uller theory, where similar considerations lead to a completion of the well-known Weil-Petersson metric. We give an application of the main theorem to the completions of Teichm¨uller space with respect to a class of metrics that generalize the Weil-Petersson metric.

We give existence results for simple closed curves with prescribed geodesic curvature on S2, which correspond to periodic orbits of a charge in a magnetic field.

The sharp affine isoperimetric inequality that bounds the volume of the centroid body of a star body (from below) by the volume of the star body itself is the Busemann-Petty centroid inequality. A decade ago, the Lp analogue of the classical BusemannPetty centroid inequality was proved. Here, the definition of the centroid body is extended to an Orlicz centroid body of a star body, and the corresponding analogue of the Busemann-Petty centroid inequality is established for convex bodies.

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.

Define a “Liouville domain” to be a compact exact symplectic manifold with contact-type boundary. We use embedded contact homology to assign to each four-dimensional Liouville domain (or subset thereof) a sequence of real numbers, which we call “ECH capacities”. The ECH capacities of a Liouville domain are defined in terms of the “ECH spectrum” of its boundary, which measures the amount of symplectic action needed to represent certain classes in embedded contact homology. Using cobordism maps on embedded contact homology (defined in joint work with Taubes), we show that the ECH capacities are monotone with respect to symplectic embeddings. We compute the ECH capacities of ellipsoids, polydisks, certain subsets of the cotangent bundle of T 2, and disjoint unions of examples for which the ECH capacities are known. The resulting symplectic embedding obstructions are sharp in some interesting cases, for example for the problem of embedding an ellipsoid into a ball (as shown by McDuff-Schlenk) or embedding a disjoint union of balls into a ball. We also state and present evidence for a conjecture under which the asymptotics of the ECH capacities of a Liouville domain recover its symplectic volume.