Structured program theorem

Abstract: In the last 15 years, White and Huisken-Sinestrari developed a far-reaching structure theory for the mean curvature flow of mean convex hypersurfaces. Their papers provide a package of estimates and structural results that yield a precise description of singularities and of high-curvature regions in a mean convex flow. In the present paper, we give a new treatment of the theory of mean convex (and k-convex) flows. This includes: (1) an estimate for derivatives of curvatures, (2) a convexity estimate, (3) a cylindrical estimate, (4) a global convergence theorem, (5) a structure theorem for ancient solutions, and (6) a partial regularity theorem. Our new proofs are both more elementary and substantially shorter than the original arguments. Our estimates are local and universal. A key ingredient in our new approach is the new noncollapsing result of Andrews [2]. Some parts are also inspired by the work of Perelman [32,33]. In a forthcoming paper [17], we will give a new construction of mean curvature flow with surgery based on the methods established in the present paper. Note added in May 2015. Since the first version of this paper was posted on arxiv in April 2013, the estimates have been used to construct mean convex flow with surgery in ℝ3 by Brendle and Huisken [5] in September 2013 and in another paper by the authors in April 2014.© 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Abstract: We establish a general structure theorem for the singular part of A-free Radon measures, where A is a linear PDE operator. By applying the theorem to suitably chosen differential operators A, we obtain a simple proof of Alberti’s rank-one theorem and, for the first time, its extensions to functions of bounded deformation (BD). We also prove a structure theorem for the singular part of a finite family of normal currents. The latter result implies that the Rademacher theorem on the differentiability of Lipschitz functions can hold only for absolutely continuous measures and that every top-dimensional Ambrosio–Kirchheim metric current in Rd is a Federer–Fleming flat chain.

Abstract: De Finetti’s classical result of [18] identifying the law of an exchangeable family of random variables as a mixture of i.i.d. laws was extended to structure theorems for more complex notions of exchangeability by Aldous [1, 2, 3], Hoover [41, 42], Kallenberg [44] and Kingman [47]. On the other hand, such exchangeable laws were first related to questions from combinatorics in an independent analysis by Fremlin and Talagrand [29], and again more recently in Tao [62], where they appear as a natural proxy for the ‘leading order statistics’ of colourings of large graphs or hypergraphs. Moreover, this relation appears implicitly in the study of various more bespoke formalisms for handling ‘limit objects’ of sequences of dense graphs or hypergraphs in a number of recent works, including Lovasz and Szegedy [52], Borgs, Chayes, Lovasz, Sos, Szegedy and Vesztergombi [17], Elek and Szegedy [24] and Razborov [54, 55]. However, the connection between these works and the earlier probabilistic structural results seems to have gone largely unappreciated. In this survey we recall the basic results of the theory of exchangeable laws, and then explain the probabilistic versions of various interesting questions from graph and hypergraph theory that their connection motivates (particularly extremal questions on the testability of properties for graphs and hypergraphs). We also locate the notions of exchangeability of interest to us in the context of other classes of probability measures subject to various symmetries, in particular contrasting the methods employed to analyze exchangeable laws with related structural results in ergodic theory, particular the Furstenberg-Zimmer structure theorem for probability-preserving ℤ-systems, which underpins Furstenberg’s ergodic-theoretic proof of Szemeredi’s Theorem. The forthcoming paper [10] will make a much more elaborate appeal to the link between exchangeable laws and dense (directed) hypergraphs to establish various results in property testing.