In this paper, we develop an approach to the study of compact K~ hler manifolds which admit mappings of everywhere maximal rank into quotients of polydiscs, eg into Riemann surfaces or products of them. One main tool will be a detailed study of the harmonic maps in the corresponding homotopy classes (for definition and general properties of harmonic maps between Riemannian manifolds see [3]). Starting with a result of Siu, we prove in Sect. 2 that the local level sets of the components of these mappings are analytic subvarieties of the domain. This, together with a generalization of the similarity principle of Bers and Vekua which is proved in the appendix and a residue argument, enables us to give conditions involving the Chern and K~ ihler classes of the considered manifolds, under which this harmonic map is of maximal rank everywhere and, in case domain and image have the same dimension, in

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate in a rather general setup how isoperimetric inequalities and lower bounds of the eigenvalues of the Laplacian can be derived from existence of a distance function with controllable

We prove the following stronger version of the positivity of quasi-local energy (mass) stated by Liu and Yau: the quasi-local energy of each connected component of the boundary of a compact spacelike hypersurface which satisfies the local energy condition is strictly positive unless the spacetime is flat along the spacelike hypersurface and the boundary of the spacelike hypersurface is connected.

We study the CalabiYau equation on symplectic manifolds. We show that Donaldson's conjecture on estimates for this equation in terms of a taming symplectic form can be reduced to an integral estimate of a scalar potential function. Under a positive curvature condition, we show that the conjecture holds.

1. Statement of results Let Mn be a compact manifold of dimension n endowed with a Riemannian metric. The spectrum of the Laplacian,, acting on functions form a discrete set of the form {0< 1 2 k}. In 1970, Joseph Hersch [5] gave a sharp upper bound for the first non-zero eigenvalue 1 for any Riemannian metric on the 2-sphere in terms of its volume alone. Similar estimates for 1 on any compact oriented surfaces were derived by Yang-Yau [7]. The second and the third authors [6] studied the nonorientable surfaces and pointed out the relationship of 1 and the conformal class of the surface. In fact, their estimates were applied to study the Willmore problem. Another application of these types of upper bounds was found by Choi-Schoen [3] in relation to the set of all minimal surfaces in a compact 3-manifold of positive Ricci curvature. The purpose of this paper is to prove a higher dimensional generalization of the above results. It was pointed out by Marcel Berger [1] that Herschs theorem fails in higher dimensional spheres. In view of the relationship between 1 and the conformal