Convex isometric folding.
Every bounded convex open set Ω of Rm is endowed with its Hilbert metric dΩ. We give a necessary and sufficient condition, called quasisymmetric convexity, for this metric space to be hyperbolic. As a corollary, when the boundary is real analytic, Ω is always hyperbolic. In dimension 2, this condition is: in affine coordinates, the boundary ∂Ω is locally the graph of a C1 strictly convex function whose derivative is quasisymmetric.
We study the evolution of a closed, convex hypersurface in in direction of its normal vector, where the speed equals a power of the mean curvature. We show that if initially the ratio of the biggest and smallest principal curvatures at every point is close enough to , depending only on and , then this is maintained under the flow. As a consequence we obtain that, when rescaling appropriately as the flow contracts to a point, the evolving surfaces converge to the unit sphere.
These are the lecture notes of a minicourse given at a winter school in Marseille 2011. The aim of the course was to give an introduction to recent work on the geometry of the space of Kähler metrics associated to an ample line bundle. The emphasis of the course was the role of convexity, both as a motivating example and as a tool.