In this thesis, first, joint with Longzhi Lin, we establish estimates for the harmonic map heat flow from the unit circle into a closed manifold, and use it to construct sweepouts with the following good property: each curve in the tightened sweepout, whose energy is close to the maximal energy of curves in the sweepout, is itself close to a closed geodesic. Second, we prove the uniqueness for energy decreasing weak solutions of the harmonic map heat flow from the unit open disk into a closed manifold, given any H1 initial data and boundary data, which is the restriction of the initial data on the boundary of the disk. Previously, under an additional assumption on boundary regularity, this uniqueness result was obtained by Rivière (when the target manifold is the round sphere and the energy of initial data is small) and Freire (for general target manifolds). The point of our uniqueness result is that no boundary regularity assumption is needed. Also, we prove the exponential convergence of the harmonic map heat flow, assuming that the energy is small at all times. Third, we prove that smooth self-shrinkers in the Euclidean space, that are entire graphs, are hyperplanes. This generalizes an earlier result by Ecker and Huisken: no polynomial growth assumption at infinity is needed.

This doctoral dissertation is on the theory of Minimal Surfaces and of singularities in Mean Curvature Flow, for smooth submanifolds Y" in an ambient Riemannian (n+ 1)-manifold Nn+1, including: (1) New asymptotically conical self-shrinkers with a symmetry, in R"+1. (1') Classification of complete embedded self-shrinkers with a symmetry, in IR"+1, and of asymptotically conical ends with a symmetry. (2) Construction of complete, embedded self-shrinkers E2 C R3 of genus g, with asymptotically conical infinite ends, via minimal surface gluing. (3) Construction of closed embedded self-shrinkers y2 C R3 with genus g, via minimal surface gluing. In the work there are two central geometric and analytic themes that cut across (1)-(3): The notion of asymptotically conical infinite ends in (1)-(1') and (2), and in (2) and (3) the gluing methods for minimal surfaces which were developed by Nikolaos Kapouleas. For the completion of (2) it was necessary to initiate the development of a stability theory in a setting with unbounded geometry, the manifolds in question having essentially singular (worse than cusp-like) infinities. This was via a Schauder theory in weighted Hölder spaces for the stability operator, which is a Schrodinger operator of Ornstein-Uhlenbeck type, on the self-shrinkers viewed as minimal surfaces. This material is, for the special case of graphs over the plane, included as part of the thesis. The results in (1)-(1') are published as the joint work [KMø 1] with Stephen Kleene, and the result in (2) was proven in collaboration with Kleene-Kapouleas, and appeared in [KKMø 0]. The results in (3) are contained in the preprint [Mø1].

This volume collects contributions from the speakers at an INdAM Intensive period held at the University of Bari in 2017. The contributions cover several aspects of partial differential equations whose development in recent years has experienced major breakthroughs in terms of both theory and applications. The topics covered include nonlocal equations, elliptic equations and systems, fully nonlinear equations, nonlinear parabolic equations, overdetermined boundary value problems, maximum principles, geometric analysis, control theory, mean field games, and bio-mathematics. The authors are trailblazers in these topics and present their work in a way that is exhaustive and clearly accessible to PhD students and early career researcher. As such, the book offers an excellent introduction to a variety of fundamental topics of contemporary investigation and inspires novel and high-quality research.