We provide an exhaustive description of all simply connected positively curved cohomogeneity one manifolds. The description yields a complete classification in all dimensions but 7, where in addition to known examples, our list contains one exceptional space and two infinite families not yet known to carry metrics of positive curvature. The infinite families also carry a 3-Sasakian metric of cohomogeneity one, which is associated to a family of selfdual Einstein orbifold metrics on the 4-sphere constructed by Hitchin.

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.

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Motivated by the Mario-Vafa formula of Hodge integrals and physicists' predictions on local Gromov-Witten invariants of toric Fano surfaces in a Calabi-Yau threefold, the third author conjectured a formula of certain Hodge integrals in terms of certain Chern-Simons invariants of the Hopf link. We prove this formula by virtual localization on moduli spaces of relative stable morphisms.

We study the mean curvature evolution of smooth, closed, twoconvex hypersurfaces in Rn+1 for n ≥ 3.Within this framework we effect a reconciliation between the flow with surgeries—recently constructed by Huisken and Sinestrari in [HS3]—and the wellknown weak solution of the level-set flow: we prove that the two solutions agree in an appropriate limit of the surgery parameters and in a precise quantitative sense. Our proof relies on geometric estimates for certain Lp-norms of the mean curvature which are of independent interest even in the setting of classicalmean curvature flow. We additionally show how our construction can be used to pass these estimates to limits and produce regularity results for the weak solution.