We prove three new monotonicity formulas for manifolds with a lower Ricci curvature bound and show that they are connected to rate of convergence to tangent cones. In fact, we show that the derivative of each of these three monotone quantities is bounded from below in terms of the Gromov–Hausdorff distance to the nearest cone. The monotonicity formulas are related to the classical Bishop–Gromov volume comparison theorem and Perelman’s celebrated monotonicity formula for the Ricci flow. We will explain the connection between all of these.

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.

Building on [BB1] we prove a general criterion for convergence of (possibly singular) Bergman measures towards pluripotential-theoretic equilibrium measures on complex manifolds. The criterion may be formulated in terms of the growth properties of the unit-balls of certain norms on holomorphic sections, or equivalently as an asymptotic minimization property for generalized Donaldson$L$-functionals. Our result settles in particular a well-known conjecture in pluripotential theory concerning the equidistribution of Fekete points and it gives the convergence of Bergman measures towards the equilibrium measure for Bernstein-Markov measures. Applications to interpolation of holomorphic sections are also discussed.

Durhuus and Jonsson (1995) introduced the class of “locally constructible” (LC) 3-spheres and showed that there are only exponentially many combinatorial types of simplicial LC 3-spheres. Such upper bounds are crucial for the convergence of models for 3D quantum gravity.

Let ($M$,$ω$) be a connected, symplectic 4-manifold. A$semitoric integrable system$on ($M$,$ω$) essentially consists of a pair of independent, real-valued, smooth functions$J$and$H$on$M$, for which$J$generates a Hamiltonian circle action under which$H$is invariant. In this paper we give a general method to construct, starting from a collection of five ingredients, a symplectic 4-manifold equipped a semitoric integrable system. Then we show that every semitoric integrable system on a symplectic 4-manifold is obtained in this fashion. In conjunction with the uniqueness theorem proved recently by the authors, this gives a classification of semitoric integrable systems on 4-manifolds, in terms of five invariants.