We exhibit the first examples of hyperbolic three-manifolds for which the Seiberg-Witten equations do not admit any irreducible solution. Our approach relies on hyperbolic geometry in an essential way; it combines an explicit upper bound for the first eigenvalue on coexact 1-forms λ_1^* on rational homology spheres which admit irreducible solutions together with a version of the Selberg trace formula relating the spectrum of the Laplacian on coexact 1-forms with the volume and complex length spectrum of a hyperbolic three-manifold. Using these relationships, we also provide precise numerical bounds on λ_1^* for several hyperbolic rational homology spheres.

We consider the inverse curvature flow of strictly convex hypersurfaces in the space form N of constant sectional curvature K_N with speed given by F^{−α}, where α∈(0,1] for K_N=0,−1 and α=1 for K_N=1, F is a smooth, symmetric homogeneous of degree one function which is inverse concave and has dual F_∗ approaching zero on the boundary of the positive cone Γ_+. We show that the ratio of the largest principal curvature to the smallest principal curvature of the flow hypersurface is controlled by its initial value. This can be used to prove the smooth convergence of the flows.

We construct a new family of high genus examples of free boundary minimal surfaces in the Euclidean unit 3-ball by desingularizing the intersection of a coaxial pair of a critical catenoid and an equatorial disk. The surfaces are constructed by singular perturbation methods and have three boundary components. They are the free boundary analogue of the Costa-Hoffman-Meeks surfaces and the surfaces constructed by Kapouleas by desingularizing coaxial catenoids and planes. It is plausible that the minimal surfaces we constructed here are the same as the ones obtained recently by Ketover using the min-max method.

Given a family of nodal curves, a semistable modification of it is another family made up of curves obtained by inserting chains of rational curves of any given length at certain nodes of certain curves of the original family. We give comparison theorems between torsion-free, rank-1 sheaves in the former family and invertible sheaves in the latter. We apply them to show that there are functorial isomorphisms between the compactifications of relative Jacobians of families of nodal curves constructed through Caporaso’s approach and those constructed through Pandharipande’s approach.

We study Thurston’s Lipschitz and curve metrics, as well as the arc metric on the Teichmüller space of one-hold tori equipped with complete hyperbolic metrics with boundary holonomy of fixed length. We construct natural Lipschitz maps between two surfaces equipped with such hyperbolic metrics that generalize Thurston’s stretch maps and prove the following: (1) On the Teichmüller space of the torus with one boundary component, the Lipschitz and the curve metrics coincide and define a geodesic metric on this space. (2) On the same space, the arc and the curve metrics coincide when the length of the boundary component is ≤4arcsinh(1), but differ when the boundary length is large. We further apply our stretch map generalization to construct novel Thurston geodesics on the Teichmüller spaces of closed hyperbolic surfaces, and use these geodesics to show that the sum-symmetrization of the Thurston metric fails to exhibit Gromov hyperbolicity.