Optimal bounds for ancient caloric functions

For any manifold with polynomial volume growth, we show: The dimension of the space of ancient caloric functions with polynomial growth is bounded by the degree of growth times the dimension of harmonic functions with the same growth. As a consequence, we get a sharp bound for the dimension of ancient caloric functions on any space where Yau's 1974 conjecture about polynomial growth harmonic functions holds.Comment: A stronger sharp dimension bound is added which is an equality on Euclidean space. To appear in Duke Math. Journa

The singular set of mean curvature flow with generic singularities

A mean curvature flow starting from a closed embedded hypersurface in $R^{n+1}$ must develop singularities. We show that if the flow has only generic singularities, then the space-time singular set is contained in finitely many compact embedded $(n-1)$-dimensional Lipschitz submanifolds plus a set of dimension at most $n-2$. If the initial hypersurface is mean convex, then all singularities are generic and the results apply. In $R^3$ and $R^4$, we show that for almost all times the evolving hypersurface is completely smooth and any connected component of the singular set is entirely contained in a time-slice. For $2$ or $3$-convex hypersurfaces in all dimensions, the same arguments lead to the same conclusion: the flow is completely smooth at almost all times and connected components of the singular set are contained in time-slices. A key technical point is a strong {\emph{parabolic}} Reifenberg property that we show in all dimensions and for all flows with only generic singularities. We also show that the entire flow clears out very rapidly after a generic singularity. These results are essentially optimal