This article investigates when homotopies can be converted to monotone homotopies without increasing the lengths of curves. A monotone homotopy is one which consists of curves which are simple or constant, and in which curves are pairwise disjoint. We show that, if the boundary of a Riemannian disc can be contracted through curves of length less than $L$, then it can also be contracted monotonically through curves of length less than $L$. This proves a conjecture of Chambers and Rotman. Additionally, any sweepout of a Riemannian $2$-sphere through curves of length less than $L$ can be replaced with a monotone sweepout through curves of length less than $L$. Applications of these results are also discussed.

Parabolic geometric flows are smoothing for short time however, over long time, singularities are typically unavoidable, can be very nasty and may be impossible to classify. The idea of [CM6] and here is that, by bringing in the dynamical properties of the flow, we obtain also smoothing for large time for generic initial conditions. When combined with [CM1], this shows, in an important special case, the singularities are the simplest possible.

The question of the dynamics of a singularity has two parts. One is: What are the dynamics near a singularity? The second is: What is the long time behavior? That is, if the flow leaves a neighborhood of a singularity, can it return at a much later time? The first question was addressed in [CM6] and the second here.

Combined with [CM1], [CM6], we show that all other closed singularities than the (round) sphere have a neighborhood where “nearly every” closed hypersurface leaves under the flow and never returns, even to a dilated, rotated or translated copy of the singularity. In other words, it wanders off. In contrast, by Huisken, any closed hypersurface near a sphere remains close to a dilated or translated copy of the sphere at each time.

In this paper we consider type-preserving representations of the fundamental group of the three-holed projective plane into the Projective Linear Group $\operatorname{PGL}(2,\mathbb{R})$ and study the connected components with non-maximal euler class. We show that in euler class zero for all such representations there is a simple closed curve which is non-hyperbolic, while in euler class $\pm 1$ we show that there are $6$ components where all the simple closed curves are sent to hyperbolic elements and $2$ components where there are simple closed curves sent to non-hyperbolic elements. This answers a question asked by Brian Bowditch. In addition, we show also that in most of these components the action of the mapping class group on these non-maximal component is ergodic. An important tool that we use in this work is an extension of Kashaev’s theory of decorated character varieties to the context of non-orientable surfaces.

For a gerbe $\mathcal{Y}$ over a smooth proper Deligne–Mumford stack $\mathcal{B}$ banded by a finite group $G$, we prove a structure result on the Gromov–Witten theory of $\mathcal{Y}$, expressing Gromov–Witten invariants of $\mathcal{Y}$ in terms of Gromov–Witten invariants of $\mathcal{B}$ twisted by various flat $U(1)$‑gerbes on $\mathcal{B}$. This can be viewed as a Leray–Hirsch type of result for Gromov–Witten theory of gerbes.

In this paper we show that many projective Anosov representations act convex cocompactly on some properly convex domain in real projective space. In particular, if a non-elementary word hyperbolic group is not commensurable to a non-trivial free product or the fundamental group of a closed hyperbolic surface, then any projective Anosov representation of that group acts convex cocompactly on some properly convex domain in real projective space. We also show that if a projective Anosov representation preserves a properly convex domain, then it acts convex cocompactly on some (possibly different) properly convex domain.

We then give three applications. First, we show that Anosov representations into general semisimple Lie groups can be defined in terms of the existence of a convex cocompact action on a properly convex domain in some real projective space (which depends on the semisimple Lie group and parabolic subgroup). Next, we prove a rigidity result involving the Hilbert entropy of a projective Anosov representation. Finally, we prove a rigidity result which shows that the image of the boundary map associated to a projective Anosov representation is rarely a $C^2$ submanifold of projective space. This final rigidity result also applies to Hitchin representations.