Introduction. The classical Schwarz-Pick lemma states that any holomorphic map of the unit disk into itself decreases the Poincare metric. Later Ahlfors generalized this lemma to holomorphic mappings between two Riemann surfaces where curvatures of these Riemann surfaces were used in a very explicit way. More recently, Chern initiated the study of holomorphic mappings between higher-dimensional complex manifold by generalizing the Ahlfors lemma to these spaces. Then this lemma was further extended by Kobayashi, Griffiths, Wu and others. It plays a very important role in their theory. In this note, we shall prove the following generalization of the Schwarz lemma.

We prove that a proper geodesic metric space has non-positive curvature in the sense of Alexandrov if and only if it satisfies the Euclidean isoperimetric inequality for curves. Our result extends to non-geodesic spaces and non-zero curvature bounds.

In this paper, we shall discuss the existence, uniqueness and regularity of harmonic maps from an Alexandrov space into a geodesic space with curvature 􏰢 1 in the sense of Alexandrov.

In this article, we propose the notion of the general $p$-affine capacity and prove some basic properties for the general $p$-affine capacity, such as affine invariance and monotonicity. The newly proposed general $p$-affine capacity is compared with several classical geometric quantities, e.g., the volume, the $p$-variational capacity and the $p$-integral affine surface area. Consequently, several sharp geometric inequalities for the general $p$-affine capacity are obtained. These inequalities extend and strengthen many well-known (affine) isoperimetric and (affine) isocapacitary inequalities.

Solving a longstanding problem on equiangular lines, we determine, for each given fixed angle and in all sufficiently large dimensions, the maximum number of lines pairwise separated by the given angle. Fix 0<α<1. Let N_α(d) denote the maximum number of lines through the origin in R^d with pairwise common angle arccos α. Let k denote the minimum number (if it exists) of vertices in a graph whose adjacency matrix has spectral radius exactly (1−α)/(2α). If k<∞, then N_α(d)= ⌊ k(d−1)/(k−1) ⌋ for all sufficiently large d, and otherwise N_α(d)=d+o(d). In particular, N_{1/(2k−1)}(d)= ⌊ k(d−1)/(k−1) ⌋ for every integer k≥2 and all sufficiently large d. A key ingredient is a new result in spectral graph theory: the adjacency matrix of a connected bounded degree graph has sublinear second eigenvalue multiplicity.