By using Yau's Schwarz lemma and the Quillen determinant line bundles, several results about fibered algebraic surfaces and the moduli spaces of curves are improved and reproved.

If M is a hyperbolic 3-manifold with a quasigeodesic flow, then we show that 1(M) acts in a natural way on a closed disc by homeomorphisms. Consequently, such a flow either has a closed orbit or the action on the boundary circle is M¨obius-like but not conjugate into PSL(2,R).We conjecture that the latter possibility cannot occur.

The purpose of this paper is to organize some results on the local geometry of CR singular real-analytic manifolds that are images of CR manifolds via a CR map that is a diffeomorphism onto its image. We find a necessary (sufficient in dimension 2) condition for the diffeomorphism to extend to a finite holomorphic map. The multiplicity of this map is a biholomorphic invariant that is precisely the Moser invariant of the image, when it is a Bishop surface with vanishing Bishop invariant. In higher dimensions, we study Levi-flat CR singular images and we prove that the set of CR singular points must be large, and in the case of codimension 2, necessarily Levi-flat or complex. We also show that there exist real-analytic CR functions on such images that satisfy the tangential CR conditions at the singular points, yet fail to extend to holomorphic functions in a neighborhood. We provide many examples to illustrate the phenomena that arise.

In this paper, we study the geometry of compact complex manifolds with Levi-Civita Ricci-flat metrics and prove that compact complex surfaces admitting Levi-Civita Ricci-flat metrics are Khler Calabi-Yau surfaces or Hopf surfaces.

In this companion piece to [9], some variations on the main results there are sketched. In particular, • the recursions in [9], which we interpreted as the quantum Lefschetz, is re- formulated in terms of Givental’s quantization formalism, or equivalently, a summation of finitely many graphs; • varietiesofmodificationoftheauxilliaryspaces(masterspaces)forthefixed point localization are given, leading to different (looking) recursions; • applications of this circle of ideas to derive (apparently) new relations of Gromov–Witten invariants.