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.

On the manifoldM(M) of all Riemannian metrics on a compact manifold M, one can consider the natural L2-metric as described first by [11]. In this paper we consider variants of this metric, which in general are of higher order. We derive the geodesic equations; we show that they are well-posed under some conditions and induce a locally diffeomorphic geodesic exponential mapping. We give a condition when Ricci flow is a gradient flow for one of these metrics.

We consider compact submanifolds of dimension n  2 in Rn+k, with nonzero mean curvature vector everywhere, and such that the full norm of the second fundamental form is bounded by a fixed multiple (depending on n) of the length of the mean curvature vector at every point. We prove that the mean curvature flow deforms such a submanifold to a point in finite time, and that the solution is asymptotic to a shrinking sphere in some (n + 1)- dimensional affine subspace of Rn+k.

Let T be the Teichm¨uller space of marked genus g, n punctured Riemann surfaces with its bordification T the augmented Teichm ¨uller space of marked Riemann surfaces with nodes, [Abi77,Ber74]. Provided with the WP metric, T is a complete CAT(0) metric space, [DW03,Wol03, Yam04]. An invariant of a marked hyperbolic structure is the length ℓ of the geodesic α in a free homotopy class. A basic feature of Teichm¨uller theory is the interplay of two-dimensional hyperbolic geometry, Weil-Petersson (WP) geometry and the behavior of geodesic-length functions. Our goal is to develop an understanding of the intrinsic local WP geometry through a study of the gradient and Hessian of geodesic-length functions. Considerations include expansions for the WP pairing of gradients, expansions for the Hessian and covariant derivative, comparability models for the WP metric, as well as the behavior of WP geodesics, including a description of the Alexandrov tangent cone at the augmentation. Approximations and applications for geodesics close to the augmentation are developed. An application for fixed points of group actions is described. Bounding configurations and functions on the hyperbolic plane is basic to our approach. Considerations include analyzing the orbit of a discrete group of isometries and bounding sums of the inverse square exponential-distance.

We study isometric Lie group actions on symmetric spaces admitting a section, i.e., a submanifold that meets all orbits orthogonally at every intersection point. We classify such actions on the compact symmetric spaces with simple isometry group and rank greater than one. In particular, we show that these actions are hyperpolar, i.e., the sections are flat.