It is known that if the special automorphism group SAut(X) of a quasiaffine variety X of dimension at least 2 acts transitively on X, then this action is infinitely transitive. In this paper we question whether this is the only possibility for the automorphism group Aut(X) to act infinitely transitively on X. We show that this is the case, provided X admits a nontrivial Ga or Gm-action. Moreover, 2-transitivity of the automorphism group implies infinite transitivity.

We show that the analogue of Hamilton's Ricci flow in the combinatorial setting produces solutions which converge exponentially fast to Thurston's circle packing on surfaces. As a consequence, a new proof of Thurston's existence of circle packing theorem is obtained. As another consequence, Ricci flow suggests a new algorithm to find circle packings.

We conjecture that appropriate K-theoretic Gromov-Witten invariants of complex flag manifolds G/B are governed by finite-difference versions of Toda systems constructed in terms of the Langlands-dual quantized universal enveloping algebras U_q(g'). The conjecture is proved in the case of classical flag manifolds of the series A. The proof is based on a refinement of the famous Atiyah-Hirzebruch argument for rigidity of arithmetical genus applied to hyperquot-scheme compactifications of spaces of rational curves in the flag manifolds.

The main results of this paper involve general algebraic differentials ω on a general pencil of algebraic curves. We show how to determine whether ω is integrable in elementary terms for infinitely many members of the pencil. In particular, this corrects an assertion of James Davenport from 1981 and provides the first proof, even in rather strengthened form. We also indicate analogies with work of Andre and Hrushovski and with the Grothendieck–Katz Conjecture. To reach this goal, we first provide proofs of independent results which extend conclusions of relative Manin–Mumford type allied to the Zilber–Pink conjectures: we characterise torsion points lying on a general curve in a general abelian scheme of arbitrary relative dimension at least 2. In turn, we present yet another application of the latter results to a rather general pencil of Pell equations A^2−DB^2=1 over a polynomial ring. We determine whether the Pell equation (with squarefree D) is solvable for infinitely many members of the pencil.

The motivation for this paper is the study of arithmetic properties of Shimura varieties, in particular the Newton stratification of the special fiber of a suitable integral model at a prime with parahoric level structure. This is closely related to the structure of RapoportZink spaces and of affine DeligneLusztig varieties. We prove a HodgeNewton decomposition for affine DeligneLusztig varieties and for the special fibers of RapoportZink spaces, relating these spaces to analogous ones defined in terms of Levi subgroups, under a certain condition (HodgeNewton decomposability) which can be phrased in combinatorial terms. Second, we study the Shimura varieties in which every non-basic\sigma-isogeny class is HodgeNewton decomposable. We show that (assuming the axioms of He and Rapoport in Manuscr. Math. 152 (34): 317343, 2017) this condition is equivalent to nice conditions on either the basic locus or on