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 give a complete proof of the Bers–Sullivan–Thurston density conjecture. In the light of the ending lamination theorem, it suffices to prove that any collection of possible ending invariants is realized by some algebraic limit of geometrically finite hyperbolic manifolds. The ending invariants are either Riemann surfaces or filling laminations supporting Masur domain measured laminations and satisfying some mild additional conditions. With any set of ending invariants we associate a sequence of geometrically finite hyperbolic manifolds and prove that this sequence has a convergent subsequence. We derive the necessary compactness theorem combining the Rips machine with non-existence results for certain small actions on real trees of free products of surface groups and free groups. We prove then that the obtained algebraic limit has the desired conformal boundaries and the property that none of the filling laminations is realized by a pleated surface. In order to be able to apply the ending lamination theorem, we have to prove that this algebraic limit has the desired topological type and that these non-realized laminations are ending laminations. That this is the case is the main novel technical result of this paper. Loosely speaking, we show that a filling Masur domain lamination which is not realized is an ending lamination.

We propose a finite-dimensional variational principle on triangulated 3-manifolds so that its critical points are related to solutions to Thurston’s gluing equation and Haken’s normal surface equation. The action functional is the volume.

Let g(t) be a smooth complete solution to the Ricci flow on a noncompact manifold such that g(0) is Kahler. We prove that if |Rm(g(t))| is bounded by a/t for some a > 0, then g(t) is Kahler for t > 0. We prove that there is a constant a(n) > 0 depending only on n such that the following is true: Suppose g(t) is a smooth complete solution to the Kahler-Ricci flow on a non-compact n-dimensional complex manifold such that g(0) has nonnegative holomorphic bisectional curvature and |Rm(g(t))| ≤ a(n)/t, then g(t) has nonnegative holomorphic bisectional curvature for t > 0. These generalize the results by Wan-Xiong Shi. As applications, we prove that (i) any complete noncompact Kahler manifold with nonnegative complex sectional curvature and maximum volume growth is biholomorphic to C^n; and (ii) there is ε(n) > 0 depending only on n such that if (M^n,g_0) is a complete noncompact Kahler manifold of complex dimension n with nonnegative holomorphic bisectional curvature and maximum volume growth and if (1+ε(n))^{−1}h ≤ g_0 ≤ (1+ε(n))h for some Riemannian metric h with bounded curvature, then M is biholomorphic to C^n.

We prove higher regularity properties of inverse mean curvature flow in Euclidean space: A sharp lower bound for the mean curvature is derived for star-shaped surfaces, independently of the initial mean curvature. It is also shown that solutions to the inverse mean curvature flow are smooth if the mean curvature is bounded from below. As a consequence we show that weak solutions of the inverse mean curvature flow are smooth for large times,beginning from the first time where a surface in the evolution is star-shaped.