The Orlicz–Legendre ellipsoids, which are in the framework of emerging dual Orlicz Brunn–Minkowski theory, are introduced for the first time. They are in some sense dual to the recently found Orlicz–John ellipsoids, and have largely generalized the classical Legendre ellipsoid of inertia. Several new affine isoperimetric inequalities are established. The connection between the characterization of Orlicz– Legendre ellipsoids and isotropy of measures is demonstrated.

The Orlicz–John ellipsoids, which are in the framework of the booming Orlicz Brunn–Minkowski theory, are introduced for the first time. It turns out that they are generalizations of the classical John ellipsoid and the evolved Lp John ellipsoids. The analog of Ball’s volume-ratio inequality is established for the new Orlicz–John ellipsoids. The connection between the isotropy of measures and the characterization of Orlicz–John ellipsoids is demonstrated.

Convex bodies with identical John and LYZ ellipsoids are characterized. This solves an important problem from convex geometry posed by G. Zhang. As applications, several sharp affine isoperimetric inequalities are established.

Lutwak, Yang and Zhang defined the cone volume functional U over convex polytopes in R^n containing the origin in their interiors, and conjectured that the greatest lower bound on the ratio of this centro-affine invariant U to volume V is attained by parallelotopes. In this paper, we give affirmative answers to the conjecture in R^2 and R^3. Some new sharp inequalities characterizing parallelotopes in Rn are established. Moreover, a simplified proof for the conjecture restricted to the class of origin-symmetric convex polytopes in Rn is provided.

Quantum gravity in the region very near the horizon of an extreme Kerr black hole (whose angular momentum and mass are related by J=GM^2) is considered. It is shown that consistent boundary conditions exist, for which the asymptotic symmetry generators form one copy of the Virasoro algebra with central charge c_L=12J / \hbar. This implies that the near-horizon quantum states can be identified with those of (a chiral half of) a two-dimensional conformal field theory (CFT). Moreover, in the extreme limit, the Frolov-Thorne vacuum state reduces to a thermal density matrix with dimensionless temperature T_L=1/2\pi and conjugate energy given by the zero mode generator, L_0, of the Virasoro algebra. Assuming unitarity, the Cardy formula then gives a microscopic entropy S_{micro}=2\pi J / \hbar for the CFT, which reproduces the macroscopic Bekenstein-Hawking entropy S_{macro}=Area / 4\hbar G. The results apply to any consistent unitary quantum theory of gravity with a Kerr solution. We accordingly conjecture that extreme Kerr black holes are holographically dual to a chiral two-dimensional conformal field theory with central charge c_L=12J / \hbar, and in particular that the near-extreme black hole GRS 1915+105 is approximately dual to a CFT with c_L \sim 2 \times 10^{79}.