We prove the existence of a smooth minimizer of the Willmore energy in the class of conformal immersions of a given closed Riemann surface into IRn, n = 3, 4, if there is one conformal immersion with Willmore energy smaller than a certain bound Wn,p depending on codimension and genus p of the Riemann surface. For tori in codimension 1, we know W3,1 = 8 .

We introduce a new geometric flow, called the chord shortening flow, which is the negative gradient flow for the length functional on the space of chords with end points lying on a fixed submanifold in Euclidean space. As an application, we give a simplified proof of a classical theorem of Lusternik and Schnirelmann (and a generalization by Riede and Hayashi) on the existence of multiple orthogonal geodesic chords. For a compact convex planar domain, we show that any convex chord not orthogonal to the boundary would shrink to a point in finite time under the flow.

Let V be a complex nonsingular projective 3-fold of general type. We shall give a detailed classification up to baskets of singularities on a minimal model of V . We show that the m-canonical map of V is birational for all m≥73 and that the canonical volume Vol(V ) ≥ 1/2660 . When (OV ) ≤1, our result is Vol(V )≥1/420 , which is optimal. Other effective results are also included in the paper.

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