With contributions by leading experts in geometric analysis, this volume is documenting the material presented in the John H. Barrett Memorial Lectures held at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, on May 29 - June 1, 2018. The central topic of the 2018 lectures was mean curvature flow, and the material in this volume covers all recent developments in this vibrant area that combines partial differential equations with differential geometry.

With contributions by leading experts in geometric analysis, this volume is documenting the material presented in the John H. Barrett Memorial Lectures held at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, on May 29 - June 1, 2018. The central topic of the 2018 lectures was mean curvature flow, and the material in this volume covers all recent developments in this vibrant area that combines partial differential equations with differential geometry.

This book is an introduction to the subject of mean curvature flow of hypersurfaces with special emphasis on the analysis of singularities. This flow occurs in the description of the evolution of numerous physical models where the energy is given by the area of the interfaces. These notes provide a detailed discussion of the classical parametric approach (mainly developed by R. Hamilton and G. Huisken). They are well suited for a course at PhD/PostDoc level and can be useful for any researcher interested in a solid introduction to the technical issues of the field. All the proofs are carefully written, often simplified, and contain several comments. Moreover, the author revisited and organized a large amount of material scattered around in literature in the last 25 years.

Minimal surfaces date back to Euler and Lagrange and the beginning of the calculus of variations. Many of the techniques developed have played key roles in geometry and partial differential equations. Examples include monotonicity and tangent cone analysis originating in the regularity theory for minimal surfaces, estimates for nonlinear equations based on the maximum principle arising in Bernstein's classical work, and even Lebesgue's definition of the integral that he developed in his thesis on the Plateau problem for minimal surfaces. This book starts with the classical theory of minimal surfaces and ends up with current research topics. Of the various ways of approaching minimal surfaces (from complex analysis, PDE, or geometric measure theory), the authors have chosen to focus on the PDE aspects of the theory. The book also contains some of the applications of minimal surfaces to other fields including low dimensional topology, general relativity, and materials science. The only prerequisites needed for this book are a basic knowledge of Riemannian geometry and some familiarity with the maximum principle.

This volume contains a collection of well-written surveys provided by experts in Global Differential Geometry to give an overview over recent developments in Riemannian Geometry, Geometric Analysis and Symplectic Geometry. The papers are written for graduate students and researchers with a general interest in geometry, who want to get acquainted with the current trends in these central fields of modern mathematics.

We study Brakke's motion of varifolds by mean curvature in the special case that the initial surface is an integral cycle, giving a new existence proof by mean of elliptic regularization. Under a uniqueness hypothesis, we obtain a weakly continuous family of currents solving Brakke's motion. These currents remain within the corresponding level-set motion by mean curvature, as defined by Evans-Spruck and Chen-Giga-Goto. Now let [italic capital]T0 be the reduced boundary of a bounded set of finite perimeter in [italic capital]R[superscript italic]n. If the level-set motion of the support of [italic capital]T0 does not develop positive Lebesgue measure, then there corresponds a unique integral [italic]n-current [italic capital]T, [partial derivative/boundary/degree of a polynomial symbol][italic capital]T = [italic capital]T0, whose time-slices form a unit density Brakke motion. Using Brakke's regularity theorem, spt [italic capital]T is smooth [script capital]H[superscript italic]n-almost everywhere. In consequence, almost every level-set of the level-set flow is smooth [script capital]H[superscript italic]n-almost everywhere in space-time.

The authors study noncompact surfaces evolving by mean curvature flow (mcf). For an open set of initial data that are $C^3$-close to round, but without assuming rotational symmetry or positive mean curvature, the authors show that mcf solutions become singular in finite time by forming neckpinches, and they obtain detailed asymptotics of that singularity formation. The results show in a precise way that mcf solutions become asymptotically rotationally symmetric near a neckpinch singularity.