In this paper we discuss the change in contact structures as their supporting open book decompositions have their binding components cabled. To facilitate this and applications we define the notion of a rational open book decomposition that generalizes the standard notion of open book decomposition and allows one to more easily study surgeries on transverse knots. As a corollary to our investigation we are able to show there are Stein fillable contact structures supported by open books whose monodromies cannot be written as a product of positive Dehn twists. We also exhibit several monoids in the mapping class group of a surface that have contact geometric significance.

We nd a one-parameter family of coordinates f hgh2R which is a deformation of Penner's simplicial coordinate of the decorated Teichmuller space of an ideally triangulated punctured surface (S; T) of negative Euler characteristic. If h > 0, the decorated Teichmuller space in the h coordinate becomes an explicit convex polytope P(T) independent of h, and if h < 0, the decorated Teichmuller space becomes an explicit bounded convex polytope Ph(T) so that Ph(T)  Ph0 (T) if h < h0. As a consequence, Bowditch-Epstein and Penner's cell decomposition of the decorated Teichmuller space is reproduced.

We consider inverse curvature ows in Hn+1 with star-shaped initial hypersurfaces and prove that the ows exist for all time, and that the leaves converge to innity, become strongly convex exponentially fast and also more and more totally umbilic. Afteran appropriate rescaling the leaves converge in C1 to a sphere.

Contrast to the hyperbolic mean curvature flows studied in [HKL], [LS], and [KW], a new hyperbolic curvature flow is proposed for convex hypersurfaces. This flow is most suited when the Gauss curvature is involved. The equation satisfied by the graph of the hypersurface under this flow gives rise to a new class of fully nonlinear Euclidean invariant hyperbolic equations.

We consider the metric space of all toric K¨ahler metrics on a compact toric manifold; when “looking at it from infinity” (following Gromov), we obtain the tangent cone at infinity, which is parametrized by equivalence classes of complete geodesics. In the present paper, we study the associated limit for the family of metrics on the toric variety, its quantization, and degeneration of generic divisors. The limits of the corresponding K¨ahler polarizations become degenerate along the Lagrangian fibration defined by the moment map. This allows us to interpolate continuously between geometric quantizations in the holomorphic and real polarizations and show that the monomial holomorphic sections of the prequantum bundle converge to Dirac delta distributions supported on BohrSommerfeld fibers. In the second part, we use these families of toric metric degenerations to study the limit of compact hypersurface amoebas and show that in Legendre transformed variables they are described by tropical amoebas. We believe that our approach gives a different, complementary, perspective on the relation between complex algebraic geometry and tropical geometry.