We provide a uniform vanishing result for the graded components of the finite length Koszul module associated to a subspace $K\subseteq {\wedge }^{2}V$ as well as a sharp upper bound for its Hilbert function. This purely algebraic statement has interesting applications to the study of a number of invariants associated to finitely generated groups, such as the Alexander invariants, the Chen ranks, and the degree of growth and virtual nilpotency class. For instance, we explicitly bound the aforementioned invariants in terms of the first Betti number for the maximal metabelian quotients of (1) the Torelli group associated to the moduli space of curves, (2) nilpotent fundamental groups of compact Kähler manifolds, and (3) the Torelli group of a free group.

We study fully nonlinear geometric flows that deform strictly k-convex hypersurfaces in Euclidean space with pointwise normal speed given by a concave function of the principal curvatures. Specifically, the speeds we consider are obtained by performing a nonlinear interpolation between the mean and the k-harmonic mean of the principal curvatures. Our main result is a convexity estimate showing that, on compact solutions, regions of high curvature are approximately convex. In contrast to the mean curvature flow, the fully nonlinear flows considered here preserve k-convexity in a Riemannian background, and we show that the convexity estimate carries over to this setting as long as the ambient curvature satisfies a natural pinching condition.

Suppose that X is a bounded-degree polynomial with nonnegative coefficients on the p-biased discrete hypercube. Our main result gives sharp estimates on the logarithmic upper tail probability of X whenever an associated extremal problem satisfies a certain entropic stability property. We apply this result to solve two long-standing open problems in probabilistic combinatorics: the upper tail problem for the number of arithmetic progressions of a fixed length in the p-random subset of the integers and the upper tail problem for the number of cliques of a fixed size in the random graph $G_{n,p}$. We also make significant progress on the upper tail problem for the number of copies of a fixed regular graph H in $G_{n,p}$. To accommodate readers who are interested in learning the basic method, we include a short, self-contained solution to the upper tail problem for the number of triangles in $G_{n,p}$ for all $p=p(n)$ satisfying $n^{-1}logn\ll p\ll 1$.