Motivated by results on the simplicial volume of locally symmetric spaces of finite volume, in this note, we observe that the simplicial volume of the moduli space Mg,n is equal to 0 if g  2; g = 1, n  3; or g = 0, n  6; and the orbifold simplicial volume of Mg,n is positive if g = 1, n = 0, 1; g = 0, n = 4. We also observe that the simplicial volume of the Deligne-Mumford compactification of Mg,n is equal to 0, and the simplicial volumes of the reductive Borel-Serre compactification of arithmetic locally symmetric spaces ..\X and the Baily-Borel compactification of Hermitian arithmetic locally symmetric spaces ..\X are also equal to 0 if the Q-rank of ..\X is at least 3 or if ..\X is irreducible and of Q-rank 2.

A geometric classification of the compact four-dimensional Einstein-Weyl manifolds with at least four-dimensional symmetry group is given. Our results also sharpen previous results on four-dimensional Einstein metrics and correct Parker's topological classification of cohomogeneity-one four-manifolds.

We study moduli spaces of O’Grady’s ten-dimensional irreducible symplectic manifolds. These moduli spaces are covers of modular varieties of dimension 21, namely quotients of hermitian symmetric domains by a suitable arithmetic group. The interesting and new aspect of this case is that the group in question is strictly bigger than the stable orthogonal group. This makes it different from both the K3 and the K3[n] case, which are of dimension 19 and 20 respectively.

We prove the nonexistence of stable immersed minimal surfaces uniformly conformally equivalent to $ \mathbb{C}$ in any complete orientable four-dimensional Riemannian manifold with uniformly positive isotropic curvature. We also generalize the same nonexistence result to higher dimensions provided that the ambient manifold has uniformly positive complex sectional curvature. The proof consists of two parts: assuming an ``eigenvalue condition'' on the $ \overline {\partial }$-operator of a holomorphic bundle, we prove (1) a vanishing theorem for these holomorphic bundles on $ \mathbb{C}$ and (2) an existence theorem for holomorphic sections with controlled growth by Hörmander's weighted $L^2$-method.

We prove a quantitative bi-Lipschitz non-embedding theorem for the Heisenberg group with its Carnot–Carathéodory metric and apply it to give a lower bound on the integrality gap of the Goemans–Linial semidefinite relaxation of the sparsest cut problem.