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Motivated by the recent work of Wu and Yau on the ampleness of canonical line bundle for compact K\"ahler manifolds with negative holomorphic sectional curvature, we introduce a new curvature notion called {\em real bisectional curvature} for Hermitian manifolds. When the metric is K\"ahler, this is just the holomorphic sectional curvature $H$, and when the metric is non-K\"ahler, it is slightly stronger than $H$. We classify compact Hermitian manifolds with constant non-zero real bisectional curvature, and also slightly extend Wu-Yau's theorem to the Hermitian case. The underlying reason for the extension is that the Schwarz lemma of Wu-Yau works the same when the target metric is only Hermitian but has nonpositive real bisectional curvature.

Let N be a three dimensional Riemannian manifold. Let E be a closed embedded surface in N. Then it is a question of basic interest to see whether one can deform: in its isotopy class to some" canonical" embedded surface. From the point of view of geometry, a natural" canonical" surface will be the extremal surface of some functional defined on the space of embedded surfaces. The simplest functional is the area functional. The extremal surface of the area functional is called the minimal surface. Such minimal surfaces were used extensively by Meeks-Yau [MY21 in studying group actions on three dimensional manifolds.

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.

By studying the heat semigroup, we prove Li-Yau type estimates for bounded and positive solutions of the heat equation on graphs, under the assumption of the curvature-dimension inequality $CDE'(n,0)$, which can be consider as a notion of curvature for graphs. Furthermore, we derive that if a graph has non-negative curvature then it has the volume doubling property, from this we can prove the Gaussian estimate for heat kernel, and then Poincar\'{e} inequality and Harnack inequality. As a consequence, we obtain that the dimension of space of harmonic functions on graphs with polynomial growth is finite, which original is a conjecture of Yau on Riemannian manifold proved by Colding and Minicozzi. Under the assumption of positive curvature on graphs, we derive the Bonnet-Myers type theorem that the diameter of graphs is finite and bounded above in terms of the positive curvature by proving some Log Sobolev inequalities.