Neckpinch — Surgery

A Lean Formalization of the Hamilton–Perelman Proof of the Three-Dimensional Poincaré Conjecture

Sun, 27 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Ziyang Qin, Yuan Liao, Ayush Khaitan, Bennett Chow — We formalize the smooth three-dimensional Poincaré conjecture, together with the Moise smoothing theorem, yielding the topological three-dimensional Poincaré conjecture. The smooth proof follows the Hamilton–Perelman route through Ricci flow with surgery and finite-time extinction.

Positive τ-bi-Ricci curvature and Mean curvature flow with surgery in hyperbolic space

Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Tianci Luo, Yong Wei, Rong Zhou — Let n≥3 and 0≤τ≤2. We prove that every smooth closed connected immersed hypersurface in hyperbolic space whose induced metric has positive τ-bi-Ricci curvature admits a mean curvature flow with surgery which has only finitely many surgery times and terminates. In the range compatible with cylindrical necks, the key ingredients are a preserved quantitative spectral pinching condition, which converts the intrinsic hypothesis into uniform two-convexity, and cylindrical and derivative estimates that remain valid across the hyperbolic standard neck replacement. At the endpoint n=3, τ=2, positive τ-bi-Ricci curvature is positive Ricci curvature and forces strict convexity, so the ordinary mean curvature flow converges to a round point. Consequently, the underlying manifold is diffeomorphic to a sphere or to a finite connected sum of copies of Sⁿ⁻¹×S¹. If the initial hypersurface is embedded and bounds a compact domain, that domain is a one-handlebody, namely a ball with finitely many one-handles attached.

Small Normal Curvature and Three-Manifold Topology

Tue, 18 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Tsz-Kiu Aaron Chow, Jingbo Wan — For m=2,3, we prove that every smooth immersion F:ℝℙ^mlooparrowrightoverline{B^(,N)(1) satisfies κ(F)²≥ 2m/(m+1), 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 κ(F)≤√(3/2) is diffeomorphic to S³, ℝℙ³, or S²× S¹. All three possibilities occur, while κ(F)<√(3/2) forces X≅ S³. 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 (min_Y R_g)sys(g)²<6π² for every spherical three-space form Y with |π₁(Y)|>2. Its proof uses systolic monotonicity along Ricci flow with surgery. This strict inequality complements the sharp scalar–systolic inequality for ℝℙ³ of Bray–Brendle–Eichmair–Neves.

Mean convex flows with surgery

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Gábor Székelyhidi — We construct a mean curvature flow with surgery starting with any compact mean convex hypersurface in ℝⁿ⁺¹, extending previous results of Huisken-Sinestrari, Brendle-Huisken, and Haslhofer-Kleiner for 2-convex flows. In contrast with previous constructions of mean curvature flow with surgery, the topological surgeries are performed by the flow itself through nondegenerate cylindrical singularities. At the same time the flow needs to be slightly adjusted at finitely many smooth times.

Nondegenerate neck pinches along the mean curvature flow

Wed, 11 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Gábor Székelyhidi — We show that for generic smooth compact initial surfaces the mean curvature flow in ℝ³ has spherical or nondegenerate neck pinch singularities at the first singular time. In particular the singularities at the first singular time are isolated in spacetime. As an application we give a new approach to constructing a mean curvature flow with surgery for smooth compact initial surfaces in ℝ³.

Moving Manifolds and the Poincare Conjecture

Wed, 15 Oct 2025 00:00:00 GMT

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.

Towards a Taub-Bolt to Taub-NUT via Ricci flow with surgery

Sat, 27 Sep 2025 00:00:00 GMT

John Hughes — This paper shows for the first time the existence of a Ricci flow with surgery with local topology change \mathbbCP^2\setminus\{ pt\} \rightarrow \mathbbR^4. The post surgery flow converges to the Taub-NUT metric on \mathbbR^4 in infinite time.

Linear stability of the blowdown Ricci shrinker in 4D

Fri, 05 Sep 2025 00:00:00 GMT

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 U(2)-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 9-dimensional set of eigentensors associated with nonnegative eigenvalues. We show that they correspond to the Ricci tensor and gauge transformations.

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

Tue, 25 Mar 2025 00:00:00 GMT

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 𝓞(Nlog N) 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.

Passing through nondegenerate singularities in mean curvature flows

Tue, 28 Jan 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Ao Sun, Zhihan Wang, Jinxin Xue — In this paper, we study the properties of nondegenerate cylindrical singularities of mean curvature flow. We prove they are isolated in spacetime and provide a complete description of the geometry and topology change of the flow passing through the singularities. Particularly, the topology change agrees with the level sets change near a critical point of a Morse function, which is the same as performing surgery. The proof is based on a new L²-distance monotonicity formula, which allows us to derive a discrete almost monotonicity of the "decay order", a discrete mean curvature flow analog to Almgren's frequency function.

Evolution of weights on a connected finite graph

Sun, 10 Nov 2024 00:00:00 GMT

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 α-lazy one-step random walk, an α-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 α-lazy one-step random walk and α-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.

A modified Ricci flow on arbitrary weighted graph

Sun, 18 Aug 2024 00:00:00 GMT

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.

A discrete uniformization theorem for decorated piecewise hyperbolic metrics on surfaces

Wed, 10 Jan 2024 00:00:00 GMT

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 α-curvature. To find decorated piecewise hyperbolic metrics with prescribed combinatorial α-curvatures, we introduce the combinatorial α-Ricci flow for decorated piecewise hyperbolic metrics. To handle the potential singularities along the combinatorial α-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 α-Ricci flow with surgery. As an application of the combinatorial α-Ricci flow with surgery, we give the existence of decorated piecewise hyperbolic metrics with prescribed combinatorial α-curvatures. We further introduce the combinatorial α-Calabi flow with surgery and study its longtime behavior.

Open manifolds with uniformly positive isotropic curvature

Mon, 27 Nov 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Hong Huang — We prove the following result: Let (M,g₀) be a complete noncompact manifold of dimension n≥ 12 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 𝓧 of spherical n-manifolds and manifolds of the form Sⁿ⁻¹ × ℝ /G, where G is a discrete subgroup of the isometry group of the round cylinder Sⁿ⁻¹× ℝ, such that M is diffeomorphic to a (possible infinite) connected sum of members of 𝓧. This extends a recent work of Huang. The proof uses Ricci flow with surgery on open orbifolds with isolated singularities.

The existence of inversive distance circle packing on hyperbolic polyhedral surface

Wed, 08 Nov 2023 00:00:00 GMT

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.

The existence of inversive distance circle packing on polyhedral surface

Thu, 02 Nov 2023 00:00:00 GMT

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.

Combinatorial curvature flows with surgery for inversive distance circle packings on surfaces

Fri, 04 Aug 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Xu Xu, Chao Zheng — Inversive distance circle packings introduced by Bowers-Stephenson are natural generalizations of Thurston's circle packings on surfaces. To find piecewise Euclidean metrics on surfaces with prescribed combinatorial curvatures, we introduce the combinatorial Calabi flow, the fractional combinatorial Calabi flow and the combinatorial p-th Calabi flow for the Euclidean inversive distance circle packings. Due to the singularities possibly developed by these combinatorial curvature flows, the longtime existence and convergence of these combinatorial curvature flows have been a difficult problem for a long time. To handle the potential singularities along these combinatorial curvature flows, we do surgery along these flows by edge flipping under the weighted Delaunay condition. Using the discrete conformal theory recently established by Bobenko-Lutz for decorated piecewise Euclidean metrics on surfaces, we prove the longtime existence and global convergence for the solutions of these combinatorial curvature flows with surgery. This provides effective algorithms for finding piecewise Euclidean metrics on surfaces with prescribed combinatorial curvatures.

Free boundary flow with surgery

Tue, 13 Jun 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Robert Haslhofer — In this paper, we prove the existence of mean curvature flow with surgery for mean-convex surfaces with free boundary. To do so, we implement our recent new approach for constructing flows with surgery without a prior estimates in the free boundary setting. The flow either becomes extinct in finite time or for t→∞ converges smoothly in the one or two sheeted sense to a finite collection of stable connected minimal surfaces with empty or free boundary (in particular, there are no surgeries for t sufficiently large). Our free boundary flow with surgery will be applied in forthcoming work with Ketover, where we will address the existence problem for 3 free boundary minimal disks in convex balls.

Classification of compact manifolds with positive isotropic curvature

Mon, 29 May 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Hong Huang — We show the following result: Let (M,g₀) be a compact manifold of dimension n≥ 12 with positive isotropic curvature. Then M is diffeomorphic to a spherical space form, or a quotient manifold of Sⁿ⁻¹× ℝ by a cocompact discrete subgroup of the isometry group of the round cylinder Sⁿ⁻¹× ℝ, or a connected sum of a finite number of such manifolds. This extends previous works of Brendle and Chen-Tang-Zhu, and improves a work of Huang. The proof uses Ricci flow with surgery on compact orbifolds, with the help of the ambient isotopy uniqueness of closed tubular neighborhoods of an isolated singular point in an orbifold.

Cobordism, Singularities and the Ricci Flow Conjecture

Wed, 21 Sep 2022 00:00:00 GMT

David Martín Velázquez, Davide De Biasio, Dieter Lust — In the following work, an attempt to conciliate the Ricci flow conjecture and the Cobordism conjecture, stated as refinements of the Swampland distance conjecture and of the No global symmetries conjecture respectively, is presented. This is done by starting from a suitable manifold with trivial cobordism class, applying surgery techniques to Ricci flow singularities and trivialising the cobordism class of one of the resulting connected components via the introduction of appropriate defects. The specific example of Ω^(SO)₄ is studied in detail. A connection between the process of blowing up a point of a manifold and that of taking the connected sum of such with ℂP}ⁿ is explored. Hence, the problem of studying the Ricci flow of a K3 whose cobordism class is trivialised by the addition of 16 copies of ℂP}² is tackled by applying both the techniques developed in the previous sections and the classification of singularities in terms of ADE groups.

A note on Alexandrov immersed mean curvature flow

Tue, 28 Jun 2022 00:00:00 GMT

Ben Lambert, Elena Mäder-Baumdicker — We demonstrate that the property of being Alexandrov immersed is preserved along mean curvature flow. Furthermore, we demonstrate that mean curvature flow techniques for mean convex embedded flows such as noncollapsing and gradient estimates also hold in this setting. We also indicate the necessary modifications to the work of Brendle–Huisken to allow for mean curvature flow with surgery for the Alexandrov immersed, 2-dimensional setting.

Lagrangian mean curvature flow in the complex projective plane

Mon, 14 Feb 2022 00:00:00 GMT

Christopher G. Evans — We prove a Thomas–Yau-type conjecture for monotone Lagrangian tori satisfying a symmetry condition in the complex projective plane ℂP}². We show that such tori exist for all time under Lagrangian mean curvature flow with surgery, undergoing at most a finite number of surgeries before flowing to a minimal Clifford torus in infinite time. Furthermore, we show that we can construct a torus with any finite number of surgeries before convergence. Along the way, we prove many interesting subsidiary results and develop methods which should be useful in studying Lagrangian mean curvature flow in non-Calabi–Yau manifolds, even in non-symmetric cases.

Canonical surgeries in rotationally invariant Ricci flow

Sun, 23 Jan 2022 00:00:00 GMT

Timothy Buttsworth, Maximilien Hallgren, Yongjia Zhang — We construct a rotationally invariant Ricci flow through surgery starting at any closed rotationally invariant Riemannian manifold. We demonstrate that a sequence of such Ricci flows with surgery converges to a Ricci flow spacetime in the sense of [32]. Results of Bamler-Kleiner [8] and Haslhofer [29] then guarantee the uniqueness and stability of these spacetimes given initial data. We simplify aspects of this proof in our setting, and show that for rotationally invariant Ricci flows, the closeness of spacetimes can be measured by equivariant comparison maps. Finally we show that the blowup rate of the curvature near a singular time for these Ricci flows is bounded by the inverse of remaining time squared.

Minimal Surface Entropy and Average Area Ratio

Mon, 18 Oct 2021 00:00:00 GMT

Ben Lowe, Andre Neves — On any closed hyperbolizable 3-manifold, we find a sharp relation between the minimal surface entropy (introduced by Calegari-Marques-Neves) and the average area ratio (introduced by Gromov), and we show that, among metrics g with scalar curvature greater than or equal to -6, the former is maximized by the hyperbolic metric. One corollary is to solve a conjecture of Gromov regarding the average area ratio. Our proofs use Ricci flow with surgery and laminar measures invariant under a PSL(2,R)-action.

Quadratically pinched submanifolds of the sphere via mean curvature flow with surgery

Wed, 08 Sep 2021 00:00:00 GMT

Mat Langford, Stephen Lynch, Huy The Nguyen — We study mean curvature flow of n-dimensional submanifolds of S_K^(n+ℓ), the round (n+ℓ)-sphere of sectional curvature K>0, under the quadratic curvature pinching condition |A|² < 1/(n-2)|H|² + 4K when n≥ 8, |A|² < 4/3n|H|²+n/2K when n=7, and |A|²<(3(n+1))/(2n(n+2))|H|²+(2n(n-1))/(3(n+1))K when n=5 or 6. This condition is related to a theorem of Li and Li [Arch. Math., 58:582–594, 1992] which states that the only n-dimensional minimal submanifolds of S_K^(n+ℓ) satisfying |A|²<2n/3K are the totally geodesic n-spheres. We prove the existence of a suitable mean curvature flow with surgeries starting from initial data satisfying the pinching condition. As a result, we conclude that any smoothly, properly immersed submanifold of S_Kⁿ⁺¹ satisfying the pinching condition is diffeomorphic either to the sphere Sⁿ or to the connected sum of a finite number of handles S¹× Sⁿ⁻¹. The results are sharp when n≥ 8 due to hypersurface counterexamples.

Fractional combinatorial Calabi flow on surfaces

Thu, 29 Jul 2021 00:00:00 GMT

Tianqi Wu, Xu Xu — Using the fractional discrete Laplace operator for triangle meshes, we introduce a fractional combinatorial Calabi flow for discrete conformal structures on surfaces, which unifies and generalizes Chow-Luo's combinatorial Ricci flow for Thurston's circle packings, Luo's combinatorial Yamabe flow for vertex scaling and the combinatorial Calabi flow for discrete conformal structures on surfaces. For Thurston's Euclidean and hyperbolic circle packings on triangulated surfaces, we prove the longtime existence and global convergence of the fractional combinatorial Calabi flow. For vertex scalings on polyhedral surfaces, we do surgery on the fractional combinatorial Calabi flow by edge flipping under the Delaunay condition to handle the potential singularities along the flow. Using the discrete conformal theory established by Gu et al., we prove the longtime existence and global convergence of the fractional combinatorial Calabi flow with surgery.