Uniqueness of blowups and Łojasiewicz inequalities

Once one knows that singularities occur, one naturally wonders what the singularities are like. For minimal varieties the first answer, already known to Federer-Fleming in 1959, is that they weakly resemble cones. For mean curvature flow, by the combined work of Huisken, Ilmanen, and White, singular...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Colding, Tobias, Minicozzi, William
Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Mathematics
Format: Article
Language:en_US
Published: Princeton University Press 2017
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/110508
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6208-384X
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4211-6354
Description
Summary:Once one knows that singularities occur, one naturally wonders what the singularities are like. For minimal varieties the first answer, already known to Federer-Fleming in 1959, is that they weakly resemble cones. For mean curvature flow, by the combined work of Huisken, Ilmanen, and White, singularities weakly resemble shrinkers. Unfortunately, the simple proofs leave open the possibility that a minimal variety or a mean curvature flow looked at under a microscope will resemble one blowup, but under higher magnification, it might (as far as anyone knows) resemble a completely different blowup. Whether this ever happens is one of the most fundamental questions about singularities. It is this long standing open question that we settle here for mean curvature flow at all generic singularities and for mean convex mean curvature flow at all singularities.