We provide a refinement of the Poincaré inequality on the torus $\mathbb{T}^{d}$ : there exists a set $\mathcal{B} \subset \mathbb{T} ^{d}$ of directions such that for every $\alpha \in \mathcal{B}$ there is a $c_{\alpha } > 0$ with $$\begin{aligned} \|\nabla f\|_{L^{2}(\mathbb{T}^{d})}^{d-1} \| \langle \nabla f, \alpha \rangle \|_{L^{2}(\mathbb{T}^{d})} \geq c_{\alpha }\|f\| _{L^{2}(\mathbb{T}^{d})}^{d} \quad \mbox{for all}~f\in H^{1}\bigl( \mathbb{T}^{d}\bigr)~ \mbox{with mean 0.} \end{aligned}$$ The derivative $\langle \nabla f, \alpha \rangle $ does not detect any oscillation in directions orthogonal to $\alpha $ , however, for certain $\alpha $ the geodesic flow in direction $\alpha $ is sufficiently mixing to compensate for that defect. On the two-dimensional torus $\mathbb{T}^{2}$ the inequality holds for $\alpha = (1, \sqrt{2})$ but is not true for $\alpha = (1,e)$ . Similar results should hold at a great level of generality on very general domains.

In this paper, we completely classify all compact 4-manifolds with positive isotropic curvature. We show that they are diffeomorphic to S4 or RP4 or quotients of S3 ×R by a cocompact fixed point free subgroup of the isometry group of the standard metric of S3 × R, or a connected sum of them.

In this note, we prove the sharp Davies-Gaffney-Grigor’yan lemma for minimal heat kernels on graphs.

In this paper, we show the Yau’s gradient estimate for harmonic maps into a metric space (X, dX ) with curvature bounded above by a constant κ (κ 􏰣 0) in the sense of Alexandrov. As a direct application, it gives some Liouville theorems for such harmonic maps. This extends the works of Cheng (1980) and Choi (1982) to harmonic maps into singular spaces.

This note discusses the recent work of Huang-Schoen-Wang [13] on specifying total conserved quantities of a vacuum initial data set.