The main object of this paper is to produce a deformation of the KdV hierarchy of partial differential equations. We construct this deformation by taking a certain limit of the Toda hierarchy. This construction also provides a deformation of the Virasoro algebra.

The evolution of an embedded surface under the normalized mean curvature flow is the result of a complicated interaction between the geometry of the evolving surface and the geometry of the ambient space, and is not well understood in the context of a general Riemannian manifold. In the present paper we identify a class of initial conditions, that we call "bubbles", whose dynamics is primarily determined by the ambient space. A bubble is an embedded surface that is close to a small geodesic ball; we find that its shape is robust along the evolution. Moreover, under a relatively tight condition relating shape to size, we show that the velocity of the center of the bubble is given, to principal order, by the gradient of the scalar curvature. Finally under natural conditions of compactness and nondegeneracy we show that such solutions converge, as t tends to infinity, to surfaces of constant mean curvature.

As a first step towards understanding the relationship between foliations and tight contact structures on hyperbolic 3-manifolds, we classify "extremal" tight contact structures on a surface bundle M over the circle with pseudo- Anosov monodromy. More specifically, there is exactly one tight contact structure (up to isotopy) whose Euler class, when evaluated on the fiber, equals the Euler characteristic of the fiber. This rigidity theorem is a consequence of properties of the action of pseudo-Anosov maps on the complex of curves of the fiber and a remarkable flexibility property of convex surfaces in M. Indeed, this flexibility can already be seen in surface bundles over the interval, where an analogous classification theorem is also established.