This chapter discusses some recent results by Richard Schoen and Shing-Tung Yau on the structure of manifolds with positive scalar curvature. The chapter presents theorems which are felt to provide a more complete picture of manifolds with positive scalar curvature: (1) let M be a compact four-dimensional manifold with positive scalar curvature. Then there exists no continuous map with non-zero degree onto a compact K(,1). (2) Let M be n-dimensional complete manifold with non-negative scalar curvature. Then any conformed immersion of M into Sⁿ is one to one. In particular, any complete conformally flat manifold with non-negative scalar curvature is the quotient of a domain in Sⁿ by a discrete subgroup of the conformal group. (3.) Let M be a compact manifold whose fundamental group is not of exponential growth. Then unless M is covered by Sⁿ, Sⁿ¹ x S¹ or the torus, M admits no

Recently Freed and Hopkins [11] proved that there is no parity anomaly in M-theory on pin+ manifolds in the low-energy field theory approximation, and they also developed an algebraic theory of cubic forms. Earlier Witten [33] proved the anomaly cancellation for spin manifolds by introducing the E8-bundle technique. Motivated by the cubic forms and the anomaly cancellation formulas of Witten-Freed-Hopkins, we give some new cubic forms on spin, spinc, spinω2 and orientable 12- manifolds respectively. We relate them to η-invariants when the manifolds are with boundary, and mod 2 indices on 10 dimensional characteristic submanifolds when the manifolds are spinc or spinω2 . Our method of producing these cubic forms is a combination of (generalized) Witten classes and the character of the basic representation of affine E8.

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Compactifications of symmetric spaces have been constructed by different methods for various applications. One application is to provide the so-called rational boundary components which can be used to compactify locally symmetric spaces. In this paper, we construct many compactifications of symmetric spaces using a uniform method, which is motivated by the Borel-Serre compact- ification of locally symmetric spaces. Besides unifying compactifications of both symmetric and locally symmetric spaces, this uniform construction allows one to compare and relate easily different compactifications, to extend the group action continuously to boundaries of compactifications, and to clarify the structure of the boundaries.

We prove a finiteness property of the values of the skein polynomial of homogeneous knots that allows us to establish large classes of such knots to have arbitrarily unsharp Bennequin inequality (for the Thurston-Bennequin invariant of any of their Legendrian embeddings in the standard contact structure of R3). We also give a short proof that there are only finitely many such knots that have given genus and given braid index.