We provide an exhaustive description of all simply connected positively curved cohomogeneity one manifolds. The description yields a complete classification in all dimensions but 7, where in addition to known examples, our list contains one exceptional space and two infinite families not yet known to carry metrics of positive curvature. The infinite families also carry a 3-Sasakian metric of cohomogeneity one, which is associated to a family of selfdual Einstein orbifold metrics on the 4-sphere constructed by Hitchin.

We find sufficient conditions for principal toric bundles over compact K¨ahler manifolds to admit Calabi-Yau connections with torsion, as well as conditions to admit strong K¨ahler connections with torsion. With the aid of a topological classification, we construct such geometry on (k−1)(S2×S4)#k(S3×S3) for all k ≥ 1.

For compact Riemannian manifolds all of whose geodesics are closed (aka Zoll manifolds) one can define the determinant of a zeroth order pseudodifferential operator by mimicking Szego’s definition of this determinant for the operator: multiplication by a bounded function, on the Hilbert space of square-integrable functions on the circle. In this paper we prove that the non-local contribution to this determinant can be computed in terms of a much simpler “zeta-regularized” determinant.

We prove a finiteness property of the values of the skein polynomial of homogeneous knots that allows us to establish large classes of such knots to have arbitrarily unsharp Bennequin inequality (for the Thurston-Bennequin invariant of any of their Legendrian embeddings in the standard contact structure of R3). We also give a short proof that there are only finitely many such knots that have given genus and given braid index.

LetMbe a compact Riemannian manifold of dimension n > 2. The k-curvature, for k = 1, 2, . . . , n, is defined as the k-th ele- mentary symmetric polynomial of the eigenvalues of the Schouten tenser. The k-Yamabe problem is to prove the existence of a con- formal metric whose k-curvature is a constant. When k = 1, it reduces to the well-known Yamabe problem. Under the assumption that the metric is admissible, the existence of solutions is known for the case k = 2, n = 4, for locally conformally flat manifolds and for the cases k > n/2. In this paper we prove the solvability of the k-Yamabe problem in the remaining cases k ≤ n/2, under the hypothesis that the problem is variational. This includes all of the cases k = 2 as well as the locally conformally flat case.