The PDE-ODI principle and cylindrical mean curvature flows

We introduce a new approach for analyzing ancient solutions and singularities of mean curvature flow that are locally modeled on a cylinder. Its key ingredient is a general mechanism, called the PDE–ODI principle, which converts a broad class of parabolic differential equations into systems of ordinary differential inequalities. This principle bypasses many delicate analytic estimates used in previous work, and yields asymptotic expansions to arbitrarily high order. As an application, we establish the uniqueness of the bowl soliton times a Euclidean factor among ancient, cylindrical flows with dominant linear mode. This extends previous results on this problem to the most general setting and is made possible by the stronger asymptotic control provided by our analysis. In the other case, when the quadratic mode dominates, we obtain a complete asymptotic expansion to arbitrary polynomial order, which will form the basis for a subsequent paper. Our framework also recovers and unifies several classical results. In particular, we give new proofs of the uniqueness of tangent flows (due to Colding-Minicozzi) and the rigidity of cylinders among shrinkers (due to Colding-Ilmanen-Minicozzi) by reducing both problems to a single ordinary differential inequality, without using the Łojasiewicz-Simon inequality. Our approach is independent of prior work and the paper is largely self-contained.