For a compact Riemann surface X of positive genus, the space of sections of a certain theta bundle on moduli of bundles of rank r and level k admits a natural map to (the dual of) a similar space of sections of rank k and level r (the strange duality isomorphism). Both sides of the isomorphism carry projective connections as X varies in a family. We prove that this map is (projectively) flat.

In this paper we explicitly construct Moishezon twistor spaces on nCP2 for arbitrary n ≥ 2 which admit a holomorphic Caction. When n = 2, they coincide with Y. Poon’s twistor spaces. When n = 3, they coincide with the ones studied by the author in [14]. When n ≥ 4, they are new twistor spaces, to the best of the author’s knowledge. By investigating the anticanonical system, we show that our twistor spaces are bimeromorphic to conic bundles over certain rational surfaces. The latter surfaces can be regarded as orbit spaces of the C-action on the twistor spaces. Namely they are minitwistor spaces. We explicitly determine their defining equations in CP4. It turns out that the structure of the minitwistor space is independent of n. Further, we explicitly construct a CP2-bundle over the resolution of this surface, and provide an explicit defining equation of the conic bundles. It shows that the number of irreducible components of the discriminant locus for the conic bundles increases as n does. Thus our twistor spaces have a lot of similarities with the famous LeBrun twistor spaces, where the minitwistor space CP1 ×CP1 in LeBrun’s case is replaced by our minitwistor spaces found in [15].

Let be the scattering relation on a compact Riemannian manifold M with non-necessarily convex boundary, that maps initial points of geodesic rays on the boundary and initial directions to the outgoing point on the boundary and the outgoing direction. Let . be the length of that geodesic ray. We study the question of whether the metric g is uniquely determined, up to an isometry, by knowledge of 冃 and . restricted on some subset D. We allow possible conjugate points but we assume that the conormal bundle of the geodesics issued from D covers T M; and that those geodesics have no conjugate points. Under an additional topological assumption, we prove that 冃 and . restricted to D uniquely recover an isometric copy of g locally near generic metrics, and in particular, near real analytic ones.

In this paper, we derive some local a priori estimates for the Ricci flow. This gives rise to some strong uniqueness theorems. As a corollary, let g(t) be a smooth complete solution to the Ricci flow on R3, with the canonical Euclidean metric E as initial data, then g(t) is trivial, i.e. g(t) ≡ E.

Luttinger surgery is used to produce minimal symplectic 4- manifolds with small Euler characteristics. We construct a minimal symplectic 4-manifold which is homeomorphic but not diffeomorphic to CP2#3CP 2 , and which contains a genus two symplectic surface with trivial normal bundle and simply-connected complement. We also construct a minimal symplectic 4-manifold which is homeomorphic but not diffeomorphic to 3CP2#5CP 2 , and which contains two disjoint essential Lagrangian tori such that the complement of the union of the tori is simply-connected. These examples are used to construct minimal symplectic manifolds with Euler characteristic 6 and fundamental group Z, Z3, or Z/p ⊕ Z/q ⊕ Z/r for integers p, q, r. Given a group G presented with g generators and r relations, a symplectic 4-manifold with fundamental group G and Euler characteristic 10 + 6(g + r) is constructed.