We show that the exterior derivative operator on a symplectic manifold has a natural decomposition into two linear differential operators, analogous to the Dolbeault operators in complex geometry. These operators map primitive forms into primitive forms and therefore lead directly to the construction of primitive cohomologies on symplectic manifolds. Using these operators, we introduce new primitive cohomologies that are analogous to the Dolbeault cohomology in the complex theory. Interestingly, the finiteness of these primitive cohomologies follows directly from an elliptic complex. We calculate the known primitive cohomologies on a nilmanifold and show that their dimensions can vary with the class of the symplectic form.

We introduce new finite-dimensional cohomologies on symplectic manifolds. Each exhibits Lefschetz decomposition and contains a unique harmonic representative within each class. Associated with each cohomology is a primitive cohomology defined purely on the space of primitive forms. We identify the dual currents of lagrangians and more generally coisotropic submanifolds with elements of a primitive cohomology, which dualizes to a homology on coisotropic chains.

Given a closed Riemannian manifold, we show how to close an orbit of the geodesic flow by a small perturbation of the metric in the C1 topology.

An expansion is developed for the Weil-Petersson Riemann curvature tensor in the thin region of the Teichm¨uller and moduli spaces. The tensor is evaluated on the gradients of geodesiclengths for disjoint geodesics. A precise lower bound for sectional curvature in terms of the surface systole is presented. The curvature tensor expansion is applied to establish continuity properties at the frontier strata of the augmented Teichm¨uller space. The curvature tensor has the asymptotic product structure already observed for the metric and covariant derivative. The product structure is combined with the earlier negative sectional curvature results to establish a classification of asymptotic flats. Furthermore, tangent subspaces of more than half the dimension of Teichm¨uller space contain sections with a definite amount of negative curvature. Proofs combine estimates for uniformization group exponential-distance sums and potential theory bounds.

We use moduli spaces of instantons and Chern-Simons invariants of flat connections to prove that the Whitehead doubles of (2, 2n − 1) torus knots are independent in the smooth knot concordance group; that is, they freely generate a subgroup of infinite rank. 1.