We develop a theory of generalized characters of local systems in $\infty $-categories, which extends classical character theory for group representations and, in particular, the induced character formula. A key aspect of our approach is that we utilize the interaction between traces and their categorifications. We apply this theory to reprove and refine various results on the composability of Becker-Gottlieb transfers, the Hochschild homology of Thom spectra, and the additivity of traces in stable $\infty $-categories.

We investigate upper bounds for the spectral ratios and gaps for the Steklov eigenvalues of balls with revolution-type metrics. We do not impose conditions on the Ricci curvature or on the convexity of the boundary. We obtain optimal upper bounds for the Steklov spectral ratios in dimensions 3 and higher. In dimension 3, we also obtain optimal upper bounds for the Steklov spectral gaps. By imposing additional constraints on the metric, we obtain upper bounds for the Steklov spectral gaps in dimensions 4 and higher.

We show that if one of various cycle types occurs in the permutation action of a finite group on the cosets of a given subgroup, then every almost conjugate subgroup is conjugate. As a number theoretic application, corresponding decomposition types of primes effect that a number field is determined by the Dedekind zeta function. As a geometric application, coverings of Riemannian manifolds with certain geodesic lifting behaviours must be isometric.

Let $\psi $ be a decreasing function. We prove zero-infinity Hausdorff measure criteria for the set of dual $\psi $-approximable points and for the set of inhomogeneous multiplicative $\psi $-approximable points on nondegenerate planar curves. Our results extend theorems of Huang [‘Hausdorff theory of dual approximation on planar curves’, J. reine angew. Math. 740 (2018), 63–76] and Beresnevich and Velani [‘A note on three problems in metric Diophantine approximation’, in: Recent Trends in Ergodic Theory and Dynamical Systems, Contemporary Mathematics, 631 (American Mathematical Society, Providence, RI, 2015), 211–229] from s-Hausdorff measure, where $s\in \mathbb R$, to the more general g-Hausdorff measure, where g is a suitable class of dimension functions.

We prove Reilly-type upper bounds for the first nonzero eigenvalue of the Steklov problem associated with the p-Laplace operator on submanifolds of manifolds with sectional curvature bounded from above by a nonnegative constant.

The space of Fredholm operators of fixed index is stratified by submanifolds according to the dimension of the kernel. Geometric considerations often lead to questions about the intersections of concrete families of elliptic operators with these submanifolds: Are the intersections nonempty? Are they smooth? What are their codimensions? The purpose of this article is to develop tools to address these questions in equivariant situations. An important motivation for this work are transversality questions for multiple covers of J-holomorphic maps. As an application, we use our framework to give a concise exposition of Wendl’s proof of the superrigidity conjecture.

Let $(M,g)$ be a closed Riemannian $4$ -manifold and let E be a vector bundle over M with structure group G, where G is a compact Lie group. We consider a new higher order Yang–Mills–Higgs functional, in which the Higgs field is a section of $\Omega ^0(\text {ad}E)$ . We show that, under suitable conditions, solutions to the gradient flow do not hit any finite time singularities. In the case that E is a line bundle, we are able to use a different blow-up procedure and obtain an improvement of the long-time result of Zhang [‘Gradient flows of higher order Yang–Mills–Higgs functionals’, J. Aust. Math. Soc. 113 (2022), 257–287]. The proof relies on properties of the Green function, which is very different from the previous techniques.

We prove an improvement on Schmidt’s upper bound on the number of number fields of degree n and absolute discriminant less than X for $6\leq n\leq 94$ . We carry this out by improving and applying a uniform bound on the number of monic integer polynomials, having bounded height and discriminant divisible by a large square, that we proved in a previous work [7].

We give a short proof of the Torelli theorem for $ALH^*$ gravitational instantons using the authors’ previous construction of mirror special Lagrangian fibrations in del Pezzo surfaces and rational elliptic surfaces together with recent work of Sun-Zhang. In particular, this includes an identification of 10 diffeomorphism types of $ALH^*_b$ gravitational instantons.

The paper proves transportation inequalities for probability measures on spheres for the Wasserstein metrics with respect to cost functions that are powers of the geodesic distance. Let $\mu$ be a probability measure on the sphere ${\bf S}^n$ of the form $d\mu =e^{-U(x)}{\rm d}x$ where ${\rm d}x$ is the rotation invariant probability measure, and $(n-1)I+{\hbox {Hess}}\,U\geq {\kappa _U}I$, where $\kappa _U>0$. Then any probability measure $\nu$ of finite relative entropy with respect to $\mu$ satisfies ${\hbox {Ent}}(\nu \mid \mu ) \geq (\kappa _U/2)W_2(\nu,\, \mu )^2$. The proof uses an explicit formula for the relative entropy which is also valid on connected and compact $C^\infty$ smooth Riemannian manifolds without boundary. A variation of this entropy formula gives the Lichnérowicz integral.

The main result of the present article is a Rademacher-type theorem for intrinsic Lipschitz graphs of codimension $k\leq n$ in sub-Riemannian Heisenberg groups ${\mathbb H}^{n}$ . For the purpose of proving such a result, we settle several related questions pertaining both to the theory of intrinsic Lipschitz graphs and to the one of currents. First, we prove an extension result for intrinsic Lipschitz graphs as well as a uniform approximation theorem by means of smooth graphs: both of these results stem from a new definition (equivalent to the one introduced by B. Franchi, R. Serapioni and F. Serra Cassano) of intrinsic Lipschitz graphs and are valid for a more general class of intrinsic Lipschitz graphs in Carnot groups. Second, our proof of Rademacher’s theorem heavily uses the language of currents in Heisenberg groups: one key result is, for us, a version of the celebrated constancy theorem. Inasmuch as Heisenberg currents are defined in terms of Rumin’s complex of differential forms, we also provide a convenient basis of Rumin’s spaces. Eventually, we provide some applications of Rademacher’s theorem including a Lusin-type result for intrinsic Lipschitz graphs, the equivalence between ${\mathbb H}$ -rectifiability and ‘Lipschitz’ ${\mathbb H}$ -rectifiability and an area formula for intrinsic Lipschitz graphs in Heisenberg groups.

The purpose of this article is to prove a ‘Newton over Hodge’ result for finite characters on curves. Let X be a smooth proper curve over a finite field $\mathbb {F}_q$ of characteristic $p\geq 3$ and let $V \subset X$ be an affine curve. Consider a nontrivial finite character $\rho :\pi _1^{et}(V) \to \mathbb {C}^{\times }$ . In this article, we prove a lower bound on the Newton polygon of the L-function $L(\rho ,s)$ . The estimate depends on monodromy invariants of $\rho $ : the Swan conductor and the local exponents. Under certain nondegeneracy assumptions, this lower bound agrees with the irregular Hodge filtration introduced by Deligne. In particular, our result further demonstrates Deligne’s prediction that the irregular Hodge filtration would force p-adic bounds on L-functions. As a corollary, we obtain estimates on the Newton polygon of a curve with a cyclic action in terms of monodromy invariants.

We generalize a classical extension result by Seeley in the context of Bastiani’s differential calculus to infinite dimensions. The construction follows Seeley’s original approach, but is significantly more involved as not only $C^k$ -maps (for ) on (subsets of) half spaces are extended, but also continuous extensions of their differentials to some given piece of boundary of the domains under consideration. A further feature of the generalization is that we construct families of extension operators (instead of only one single extension operator) that fulfill certain compatibility (and continuity) conditions. Various applications are discussed as well.

In this paper, we define a family of functionals generalizing the Yang–Mills–Higgs functionals on a closed Riemannian manifold. Then we prove the short-time existence of the corresponding gradient flow by a gauge-fixing technique. The lack of a maximum principle for the higher order operator brings us a lot of inconvenience during the estimates for the Higgs field. We observe that the $L^2$ -bound of the Higgs field is enough for energy estimates in four dimensions and we show that, provided the order of derivatives appearing in the higher order Yang–Mills–Higgs functionals is strictly greater than one, solutions to the gradient flow do not hit any finite-time singularities. As for the Yang–Mills–Higgs k-functional with Higgs self-interaction, we show that, provided $\dim (M)<2(k+1)$ , for every smooth initial data the associated gradient flow admits long-time existence. The proof depends on local $L^2$ -derivative estimates, energy estimates and blow-up analysis.

We establish a one-to-one correspondence between, on the one hand, Finsler structures on the $2$ -sphere with constant curvature $1$ and all geodesics closed, and on the other hand, Weyl connections on certain spindle orbifolds whose symmetric Ricci curvature is positive definite and whose geodesics are all closed. As an application of our duality result, we show that suitable holomorphic deformations of the Veronese embedding $\mathbb {CP}(a_1,a_2)\rightarrow \mathbb {CP}(a_1,(a_1+a_2)/2,a_2)$ of weighted projective spaces provide examples of Finsler $2$ -spheres of constant curvature whose geodesics are all closed.

We show that for any n divisible by 3, almost all order-n Steiner triple systems admit a decomposition of almost all their triples into disjoint perfect matchings (that is, almost all Steiner triple systems are almost resolvable).

This paper is devoted to the study of the normal (tangential) regularity of a closed set and the subdifferential (directional) regularity of its distance function in the context of Riemannian manifolds. The Clarke, Fréchet and proximal subdifferentials of the distance function from a closed subset in a Riemannian manifold are represented by corresponding normal cones of the set.

Given a smooth compact hypersurface $M$ with boundary $\unicode[STIX]{x1D6F4}=\unicode[STIX]{x2202}M$, we prove the existence of a sequence $M_{j}$ of hypersurfaces with the same boundary as $M$, such that each Steklov eigenvalue $\unicode[STIX]{x1D70E}_{k}(M_{j})$ tends to zero as $j$ tends to infinity. The hypersurfaces $M_{j}$ are obtained from $M$ by a local perturbation near a point of its boundary. Their volumes and diameters are arbitrarily close to those of $M$, while the principal curvatures of the boundary remain unchanged.

By an influential theorem of Boman, a function $f$ on an open set $U$ in $\mathbb{R}^{d}$ is smooth (${\mathcal{C}}^{\infty }$) if and only if it is arc-smooth, that is, $f\,\circ \,c$ is smooth for every smooth curve $c:\mathbb{R}\rightarrow U$. In this paper we investigate the validity of this result on closed sets. Our main focus is on sets which are the closure of their interior, so-called fat sets. We obtain an analogue of Boman’s theorem on fat closed sets with Hölder boundary and on fat closed subanalytic sets with the property that every boundary point has a basis of neighborhoods each of which intersects the interior in a connected set. If $X\subseteq \mathbb{R}^{d}$ is any such set and $f:X\rightarrow \mathbb{R}$ is arc-smooth, then $f$ extends to a smooth function defined on $\mathbb{R}^{d}$. We also get a version of the Bochnak–Siciak theorem on all closed fat subanalytic sets and all closed sets with Hölder boundary: if $f:X\rightarrow \mathbb{R}$ is the restriction of a smooth function on $\mathbb{R}^{d}$ which is real analytic along all real analytic curves in $X$, then $f$ extends to a holomorphic function on a neighborhood of $X$ in $\mathbb{C}^{d}$. Similar results hold for non-quasianalytic Denjoy–Carleman classes (of Roumieu type). We will also discuss sharpness and applications of these results.

We present a definable smooth version of the Thom transversality theorem. We show further that the set of non-transverse definable smooth maps is nowhere dense in the definable smooth topology. Finally, we prove a definable version of a theorem of Trotman which says that the Whitney (a)-regularity of a stratification is necessary and sufficient for the stability of transversality.