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Perelman's toolkit

Surgery

Cutting out high-curvature necks and gluing in caps to continue the flow.

11papers
0in the last 30 days
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Concept

Ricci flow with surgery

Just before a neck pinches, cut along a thin ε\varepsilon-neck, discard the high-curvature piece, glue in standard caps, and restart the flow. Perelman showed the surgery times don't accumulate, so the process continues for all time. What gets discarded is topologically simple (spherical space forms and S2×S1S^2\times S^1 pieces), which is how topology is read off from the flow.

Concept

Finite extinction

For a closed, simply connected 3-manifold (more generally, when π1\pi_1 is a free product of finite groups and copies of Z\mathbb{Z}), Ricci flow with surgery goes extinct in finite time: everything eventually becomes round and gets discarded. Tracing the surgeries backwards expresses MM as a connected sum of spherical space forms and copies of S2×S1S^2\times S^1. If MM is simply connected, that sum has to be S3S^3. This was proved independently by Perelman and by Colding–Minicozzi.

Concept

The canonical neighborhood theorem

The structural heart of Perelman's argument. For a 3-dimensional flow and each ε>0\varepsilon > 0 there is a scale r>0r > 0 such that every point with

Rm(x,t)r2|\operatorname{Rm}|(x,t) \ge r^{-2}

has a neighborhood which, rescaled to unit curvature, is ε\varepsilon-close in C[1/ε]C^{[1/\varepsilon]} to a corresponding piece of an ancient κ-solution: an ε\varepsilon-neck, an ε\varepsilon-cap, or a closed manifold of positive curvature.

In plain terms: high curvature leaves you no choices. Anywhere the flow is about to fail, the geometry is one of a short list of shapes you already understand — which is exactly what makes surgery possible.

Concept

Singular Ricci flows

Surgery works, but it depends on arbitrary parameters: how thin a neck must be before you cut. Kleiner and Lott removed the choice. A singular Ricci flow is a 4-dimensional spacetime M\mathcal{M} with a time function, a time vector field and a metric on the time slices, satisfying the canonical neighborhood assumption below any scale.

For every compact 3-manifold, such a flow exists and continues through its singularities with no parameters at all. Bamler–Kleiner then proved it is unique and depends continuously on the initial metric: Ricci flow through singularities is a canonical, deterministic process.

On arXiv

11 papers

Filter on Papers
math.DGv2arXiv:2608.18002

Small Normal Curvature and Three-Manifold Topology

Tsz-Kiu Aaron Chow, Jingbo Wan

For , we prove that every smooth immersion satisfies , with equality only for the Veronese embedding, up to congruence. We also prove that a closed, connected, orientable three-manifold admitting an immersion into a Euclidean unit ball with is diffeomorphic to , , or . All three possibilities occur, while forces . These results answer a question of Petrunin and prove a conjecture of Chodosh–Li concerning the normal curvature of three-manifolds. The key intrinsic input is the strict scalar–systolic inequality for every spherical three-space form with . Its proof uses systolic monotonicity along Ricci flow with surgery. This strict inequality complements the sharp scalar–systolic inequality for of Bray–Brendle–Eichmair–Neves.

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math.DGarXiv:2510.13511

Moving Manifolds and the Poincare Conjecture

David V. Svintradze

We present a differential geometric formulation of the Poincare problem using the calculus of moving surfaces (CMS). In this framework, an n dimensional compact hypersurface evolves under a velocity field that couples motion to the extrinsic curvature tensor while preserving topology through smooth diffeomorphic flow. A variational energy principle identifies constant mean curvature (CMC) manifolds as the unique stationary equilibria of CMS dynamics. Consequently, the evolution of any compact simply connected hypersurface relaxes to a CMC equilibrium and, in the isotropic case, to the round sphere. Unlike Ricci flow approaches, which are dimension restricted and require topological surgery, the CMS formulation holds for all dimensions and preserves manifold topology for all time. This provides a deterministic geometric mechanical route to the Poincare conclusion, unifying dynamics, topology, and equilibrium geometry within a single analytic framework.

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math.DGv2arXiv:2509.05470

Linear stability of the blowdown Ricci shrinker in 4D

Keaton Naff, Tristan Ozuch

We prove that the four-dimensional blowdown shrinking Ricci soliton constructed by Feldman-Ilmanen-Knopf is strictly linearly stable in the sense of Cao-Hamilton-Ilmanen. This provides the first known example of a non-cylindrical linearly stable shrinking Ricci soliton. This offers new insights into the topological behavior of generic solutions to the Ricci flow in four dimensions: on top of reversing connected sums and handle surgeries, they should also undo complex blow-ups. The proof starts from an explicit description of the metric and develops a tensor harmonic analysis, adapted to its weighted Lichnerowicz Laplacian and based on its -invariance. It further exploits the Kähler structure of the blowdown shrinking soliton and insights from four-dimensional selfduality. The main difficulty is that the weighted Lichnerowicz Laplacian of the soliton admits a -dimensional set of eigentensors associated with nonnegative eigenvalues. We show that they correspond to the Ricci tensor and gauge transformations.

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cs.LGarXiv:2503.19867

Geometric Meta-Learning via Coupled Ricci Flow: Unifying Knowledge Representation and Quantum Entanglement

Ming Lei, Christophe Baehr

This paper establishes a unified framework integrating geometric flows with deep learning through three fundamental innovations. First, we propose a thermodynamically coupled Ricci flow that dynamically adapts parameter space geometry to loss landscape topology, formally proved to preserve isometric knowledge embedding (Theorem ). Second, we derive explicit phase transition thresholds and critical learning rates (Theorem ) through curvature blowup analysis, enabling automated singularity resolution via geometric surgery (Lemma ). Third, we establish an AdS/CFT-type holographic duality (Theorem ) between neural networks and conformal field theories, providing entanglement entropy bounds for regularization design. Experiments demonstrate 2.1 convergence acceleration and 63% topological simplification while maintaining complexity, outperforming Riemannian baselines by 15.2% in few-shot accuracy. Theoretically, we prove exponential stability (Theorem ) through a new Lyapunov function combining Perelman entropy with Wasserstein gradient flows, fundamentally advancing geometric deep learning.

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math.CAv3arXiv:2411.06393

Evolution of weights on a connected finite graph

Jicheng Ma, Yunyan Yang

On a connected finite graph, we propose an evolution of weights including Ollivier's Ricci flow as a special case. During the evolution process, on each edge, the speed of change of weight is exactly the difference between the Wasserstein distance related to two probability measures and certain graph distance. Here the probability measure may be chosen as an -lazy one-step random walk, an -lazy two-step random walk, or a general probability measure. Based on the ODE theory, we show that the initial value problem has a unique global solution. A discrete version of the above evolution is applied to the problem of community detection. Our algorithm is based on such a discrete evolution, where probability measures are chosen as -lazy one-step random walk and -lazy two-step random walk respectively. Note that the latter measure has not been used in previous works. Moreover, only one surgery needs to be performed after the last iteration, which makes our algorithm much simpler than earlier ones based on Lin-Lu-Yau's Ricci curvature.

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math.APv3arXiv:2408.09435

A modified Ricci flow on arbitrary weighted graph

Jicheng Ma, Yunyan Yang

In this paper, we propose a modified Ricci flow, as well as a quasi-normalized Ricci flow, on arbitrary weighted graph. Each of these two flows has a unique global solution. In particular, these global existence and uniqueness results do not require an exit condition proposed by Bai et al in a recent work [2]. As applications, these two Ricci flows are applied to community detection for complex networks, including Karate Club, American football games, Facebook, as well as artificial networks. In our algorithms, unlike in [5,15], there is no need to perform surgery at every iteration, only one surgery needs to be performed after the last iteration. From three commonly used criteria for evaluating community detection algorithms, ARI, NMI and Q, we conclude that our algorithms outperform existing algorithms, including Ollivier's Ricci flow [5], normalized Ollivier's Ricci flow and normalized Lin-Lu-Yau's Ricci flow [15]. The codes for our algorithms are available at https://github.com/mjc191812/Modified-Ricci-Flow.

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math.DGarXiv:2401.05056

A discrete uniformization theorem for decorated piecewise hyperbolic metrics on surfaces

Xu Xu, Chao Zheng

In this paper, we study a natural discretization of the smooth Gaussian curvature on surfaces. A discrete uniformization theorem is established for this discrete Gaussian curvature. We further investigate the prescribing combinatorial curvature problem for a parametrization of this discrete Gaussian curvature, which is called the combinatorial -curvature. To find decorated piecewise hyperbolic metrics with prescribed combinatorial -curvatures, we introduce the combinatorial -Ricci flow for decorated piecewise hyperbolic metrics. To handle the potential singularities along the combinatorial -Ricci flow, we do surgery along the flow by edge flipping under the weighted Delaunay condition. Then we prove the longtime existence and convergence of the combinatorial -Ricci flow with surgery. As an application of the combinatorial -Ricci flow with surgery, we give the existence of decorated piecewise hyperbolic metrics with prescribed combinatorial -curvatures. We further introduce the combinatorial -Calabi flow with surgery and study its longtime behavior.

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math.DGarXiv:2311.15825

Open manifolds with uniformly positive isotropic curvature

Hong Huang

We prove the following result: Let be a complete noncompact manifold of dimension with isotropic curvature bounded below by a positive constant, with scalar curvature bounded above, and with injectivity radius bounded below. Then there is a finite collection of spherical -manifolds and manifolds of the form , where is a discrete subgroup of the isometry group of the round cylinder , such that is diffeomorphic to a (possible infinite) connected sum of members of . This extends a recent work of Huang. The proof uses Ricci flow with surgery on open orbifolds with isolated singularities.

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math.DGarXiv:2311.04450

The existence of inversive distance circle packing on hyperbolic polyhedral surface

Xiang Zhu

In this paper, we prove that given a hyperbolic polyhedral metric with an inversive distance circle packing, and a target discrete curvature satisfying Gauss-Bonnet formula, there exist a unique inversive distance circle packing which is discrete conformal to the former one. We deform the surface by discrete Ricci flow, and do surgery by edge flipping when the orthogonal circles of some faces are about to be non-compact. The revised weighted Delaunay inequality of hyperbolic case implies the compactness of the orthogonal circle. We use a variational principle of a convex Ricci potential defined on the fiber bundles with cell-decomposition and differential structure based on Teichmüller space to finish the proof.

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math.DGarXiv:2311.01272

The existence of inversive distance circle packing on polyhedral surface

Xiang Zhu

We prove that for any discrete curvature satisfying Gauss-Bonnet formula, there exist a unique up to scaling inversive distance circle packing in the discrete conformal equivalent class, whose polyhedral metric meets the target curvature. We prove it by constructing diffeomorphism between fiber bundles with cell decomposition based on Teichmüller spaces, and each discrete conformal equivalent class is a fiber passing through finite cell with respect to triangulations, which means we can do surgery on the discrete Ricci flow by edge flipping using a generalized Ptolemy equation to ensure it converge and never blow up.

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