In 1986, R. D. Cook proposed differential geometry to assess local influence of minor perturbations of statistical models. We construct a conformally invariant curvature, the conformal normal curvature, for the same purpose. This curvature provides a measure of local influence ranging from 0 to 1, with objective benchmarks to judge largeness. We study various approaches to using the conformal normal curvature and the relationships between these approaches.

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.

In this article we define new flows on the Hitchin components for PGL(V). Special examples of these flows are associated to simple closed curves on the surface and give generalized twist flows. Other examples, so called eruption flows, are associated to pair of pants in S and capture new phenomena which are not present in the case when n=2. We determine a global coordinate system on the Hitchin component. Using the computation of the Goldman symplectic form on the Hitchin component, that is developed by two of the authors in a companion paper to this article (Sun and Zhang in The Goldman symplectic form on the PGL(V)-Hitchin component, 2017. arXiv:1709.03589), this gives a global Darboux coordinate system on the Hitchin component.

We construct many new non-liftable three-dimensional Calabi–Yau spaces in positive characteristic. The technique relies on lifting a nodal model to a smooth rigid Calabi–Yau space over some number field as introduced by one of us jointily with D. van Straten.

Given a smooth polarized Riemann surface (X, L) endowed with a hyperbolic metric \omega with cusp singularities along a divisor D, we show the L^ 2 projective embedding of (X, D) defined by L^ k is asymptotically almost balanced in a weighted sense. The proof depends on sufficiently precise understanding of the behavior of the Bergman kernel in three regions, with the most crucial one being the neck region around D. This is the first step towards understanding the algebro-geometric stability of extremal Khler metrics with singularities.