This work uncovers the tropical analogue, for measured laminations, of the convex hull construction in decorated Teichm¨uller theory; namely, it is a study in coordinates of geometric degeneration to a point of Thurston’s boundary for Teichm¨uller space. This may offer a paradigm for the extension of the basic cell decomposition of Riemann’s moduli space to other contexts for general moduli spaces of flat connections on a surface. In any case, this discussion drastically simplifies aspects of previous related studies as is explained. Furthermore, a new class of measured laminations relative to an ideal cell decomposition of a surface is discovered in the limit. Finally, the tropical analogue of the convex hull construction inMinkowski space is formulated as an explicit algorithm that serially simplifies a triangulation with respect to a fixed lamination and has its own independent interest.

One of the natural generalizations of conformal structure on a two dimensional surface is a conformally flat structure on an n-manifold. In higher dimensions, not every manifold admits such a structure and it is a difficult problem to give a good classification of conformally flat manifolds. Recall that conformally flat Riemannian manifolds are manifolds whose metrics are locally conformally equivalent to the Euclidean metric. Kuiper [Kul, Ku2] was the first to study the global properties of these manifolds. He classified those compact conformally flat manifolds with abelian fundamental group. For dimensions greater than two, the Liouville theorem tells us that the conformal transformations of S" are determined locally and are given by M6bius transformations. Hence by a standard monodromy argument, a simply connected conformally flat manifold (with dimension> 3) has a conformal immersion into S" which is unique up to

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A two-dimensional periodic Schr\"{o}dingier operator is associated with every Lagrangian torus in the complex projective plane ${\mathbb C}P^2$. Using this operator we introduce an energy functional on the set of Lagrangian tori. It turns out this energy functional coincides with the Willmore functional $W^{-}$ introduced by Montiel and Urbano. We study the energy functional on a family of Hamiltonian-minimal Lagrangian tori and support the Montiel--Urbano conjecture that the minimum of the functional is achieved by the Clifford torus. We also study deformations of minimal Lagrangian tori and show that if a deformation preserves the conformal type of the torus, then it also preserves the area, i.e. preserves the value of the energy functional. In particular, the deformations generated by Novikov--Veselov equations preserve the area of minimal Lagrangian tori.

An inequality relating the Euler characteristic, the signature and the <i>L</i>₂-norm of the curvature of the bundle of densities is proved for a four-dimensional compact Einstein-Weyl manifold. This generalises the Hitchin-Thorpe inequality for Einstein manifolds. The case where equality occurs is discussed and related to Hitchin's classification of Ricci-flat self-dual four-manifolds and to the recent work of Gauduchon on closed non-exact Einstein-Weyl geometries.