We prove the vanishing of the top Chern classes of the moduli of rank three stable vector bundles on a smooth Riemann surface. More precisely, the Chern class ci for i > 6g − 5 of the moduli spaces of rank three vector bundles of degree one and two on a genus g smooth Riemann surface all vanish. This generalizes the rank two case, conjectured by Newstead and Ramanan and proved by Gieseker.

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A foliation F on a Riemannian manifold M is hyperpolar if it admits a flat section, that is, a connected closed flat submanifold of M that intersects each leaf of F orthogonally. In this article we classify the hyperpolar homogeneous foliations on every Riemannian symmetric space M of noncompact type. These foliations are constructed as follows. Let  be an orthogonal subset of a set of simple roots associated with the symmetric space M. Then  determines a horospherical decomposition M = Fs ×ErankM−||×N, where Fs  is the Riemannian product of || symmetric spaces of rank one. Every hyperpolar homogeneous foliation on M is isometrically congruent to the product of the following objects: a particular homogeneous codimension one foliation on each symmetric space of rank one in Fs , a foliation by parallel affine subspaces on the Euclidean space ErankM−||, and the horocycle subgroup N of the parabolic subgroup of the isometry group of M determined by .

We use moduli spaces of instantons and Chern-Simons invariants of flat connections to prove that the Whitehead doubles of (2, 2n − 1) torus knots are independent in the smooth knot concordance group; that is, they freely generate a subgroup of infinite rank. 1.

This note is based on a series of four lectures the author gave at University of Montpellier, September 28-30, 2015. He started with the notion of mass in general relativity, gave a brief review of some known constructions of quasi-local mass, and then discussed the new quasi-local energy and quasi-local mass which Shing-Tung Yau and the author introduced in 2009. At the end, the proof of the positivity of quasi-local energy was sketched and a stability theorem of critical points of quasi-local energy by Po-Ning Chen, Shing-Tung Yau, and the author was discussed