In this paper we discuss the change in contact structures as their supporting open book decompositions have their binding components cabled. To facilitate this and applications we define the notion of a rational open book decomposition that generalizes the standard notion of open book decomposition and allows one to more easily study surgeries on transverse knots. As a corollary to our investigation we are able to show there are Stein fillable contact structures supported by open books whose monodromies cannot be written as a product of positive Dehn twists. We also exhibit several monoids in the mapping class group of a surface that have contact geometric significance.

A longstanding question in the dual Brunn–Minkowski theory is “What are the dual analogues of Federer’s curvature measures for convex bodies?” The answer to this is provided. This leads naturally to dual versions of Minkowski-type problems: What are necessary and sufficient conditions for a Borel measure to be a dual curvature measure of a convex body? Sufficient conditions, involving measure concentration, are established for the existence of solutions to these problems.

It was in the early nineteen thirties that Douglas and Radd solved the Plateau problem for a rectifiable Jordan curve in Euclidean space. The minimal surfaces that they obtained are realized by conformal harmonic maps from the unit disk. In 1948 Morrey generalized the theorem of Douglas and Radd to minimal surfaces in a homogeneously regular Riemannian manifold. In both cases the solutions are defective as they may possess branch points. It was not until 1968 that Osserman [-24] was able to prove that interior branch points do not exist on the Douglas-Radd-Morrey solution.(Osserman's theorem in this full generality was proved by Alt [-2, 3] and Gulliver [8].) If the Jordan curve is real analytic, Gulliver and Lesley [9] showed that the solution surface is free of branch points even on its boundary. Hence, at least in this case, we know that the Douglas-Radd-Morrey solution is an immersion and represents a

In the study of geometric objects that arise naturally, the main tools are either groups or equations. In the rst case, powerful algebraic methods are available and enable one to solve many deep problems. While algebraic methods are still important in the second case, analytic methods play a dominant role, especially when the dening equations are transcendental. Indeed, even in the situation where the geometric object is homogeneous or algebraic, analytic methods often lead to important contributions. In this talk, we shall discuss a class of problems in differential geometry and the analytic methods that are involved in solving such problems.

We consider the quermassintegral preserving flow of closed \emph{h-convex} hypersurfaces in hyperbolic space with the speed given by any positive power of a smooth symmetric, strictly increasing, and homogeneous of degree one function $f$ of the principal curvatures which is inverse concave and has dual $f_*$ approaching zero on the boundary of the positive cone. We prove that if the initial hypersurface is \emph{h-convex}, then the solution of the flow becomes strictly \emph{h-convex} for $t>0$, the flow exists for all time and converges to a geodesic sphere exponentially in the smooth topology.