Two Dehn surgeries on a knot are called purely cosmetic, if they yield manifolds that are homeomorphic as oriented manifolds. Suppose there exist purely cosmetic surgeries on a knot in S^3, we show that the two surgery slopes must be the opposite of each other. One ingredient of our proof is a Dehn surgery formula for correction terms in Heegaard Floer homology.

What is the shape of a uniformly massive object that generates a gravitational potential equivalent to that of two equal point-masses? If the weight of each point-mass is sufficiently small compared to the distance between the points then the answer is a pair of balls of equal radius, one centered at each of the two points, but otherwise it is a certain domain of revolution about the axis passing through the two points. The existence and uniqueness of such a domain is known, but an explicit parameterization is known only in the plane where the region is referred to as a Neumann oval. We construct a four-dimensional “Neumann ovaloid”, solving explicitly this inverse potential problem.

In this article, we study the small sphere limit of the Wang-Yau quasi-local energy defined in [18,19]. Given a point p in a spacetime N , we consider a canonical family of surfaces approaching p along its future null cone and evaluate the limit of the Wang-Yau quasi-local energy. The evaluation relies on solving an "optimal embedding equation" whose solutions represent critical points of the quasi-local energy. For a spacetime with matter fields, the scenario is similar to that of the large sphere limit found in [7]. Namely, there is a natural solution which is a local minimum, and the limit of its quasi-local energy recovers the stress-energy tensor at p . For a vacuum spacetime, the quasi-local energy vanishes to higher order and the solution of the optimal embedding equation is more complicated. Nevertheless, we are able to show that there exists a solution which is a local minimum and that the limit of its quasi-local energy is related to the Bel-Robinson tensor. Together with earlier work [7], this completes the consistency verification of the Wang-Yau quasi-local energy with all classical limits.

We study the local curvature estimates of long-time solutions to the normalized Kähler-Ricci flow on compact Kähler manifolds with semi-ample canonical line bundle. Using these estimates, we prove that on such a manifold, the set of singular fibers of the semi-ample fibration on which the Riemann curvature blows up at time-infinity is independent of the choice of the initial Kähler metric. Moreover, when a regular fiber of the semi-ample fibration is not a finite quotient of a torus, we determine the exact curvature blow-up rate of the Kähler-Ricci flow near the regular fiber.

The face numbers of simplicial complexes without missing faces of dimension larger than$i$are studied. It is shown that among all such ($d$−1)-dimensional complexes with non-vanishing top homology, a certain polytopal sphere has the componentwise minimal$f$-vector; and moreover, among all such 2-Cohen–Macaulay (2-CM) complexes, the same sphere has the componentwise minimal$h$-vector. It is also verified that the$l$-skeleton of a flag ($d$−1)-dimensional 2-CM complex is 2($d$−$l$)-CM, while the$l$-skeleton of a flag piecewise linear ($d$−1)-sphere is 2($d$−$l$)-homotopy CM. In addition, tight lower bounds on the face numbers of 2-CM balanced complexes in terms of their dimension and the number of vertices are established.