We investigate properties of minimisers of a variational model describing the shape of charged liquid droplets. Roughly speaking, the shape of a charged liquid droplet is determined by the competition between an ”aggerating” term, due to surface tension forces, and to a ”disaggergating” term due to the repulsive effect between charged particles.

In my talk I want to present our ”first” analysis of the so called Deby-Hückel-type free energy. In particular we show that minimisers satisfy a partial regularity result, a first step of understanding the further properties of a minimiser. The presented results are joint work with Guido De Philippis and Giulia Vescovo.

The Gibbons-Hawking ansatz is a powerful method for constructing a large family of hyperkaehler 4-manifolds (which are thus Ricci-flat), which appears in a variety of contexts in mathematics and theoretical physics. I will describe work in progress to understand the theory of minimal surfaces and mean curvature flow in these 4-manifolds. In particular, I will explain a proof of a version of the Thomas-Yau Conjecture in Lagrangian mean curvature flow in this setting. This is joint work with G. Oliveira.

The translation method for constructing quasiconvex lower bound of a given function in the calculus of variations and the notion of compensated convex transforms for tightly approximate functions in Euclidean spaces will be briefly reviewed. By applying the upper compensated convex transform to the finite maximum function we will construct computable quasiconvex functions with finitely many point wells contained in a subspace with rank-one matrices. The complexity for evaluating the constructed quasiconvex functions is O(k log k) with k the number of wells involved. If time allows, some new applications of compensated convexity will be briefly discussed.

Localization technique permits to reduce full dimensional problems to possibly easier lower dimensional ones. During the last years a new approach to localization has been obtained using the powerful tools of optimal transport. Following this approach, we obtain quantitative versions of two relevant geometric inequalities  in comparison geometry as Levy-Gromov isoperimetric inequality (joint with F. Maggi and A. Mondino) and the spectral gap inequality (joint with A. Mondino and D. Semola). Both results are also valid in the more general setting of metric measure spaces verifying the so-called curvature dimension condition.

Springer theory is an important branch of geometric representation theory. It is a beautiful interplay between combinatorics, geometry and representation theory.
It started with Springer correspondence, which yields geometric construction of irreducible representations of symmetric groups, and Ginzburg's construction of universal enveloping algebra U(sl_n).

Here I will present a view of two-row Springer theory of type A (thus looking at nilpotent elements with two Jordan blocks) from a scope of a symplectic topologist (hence the title), that yields connections between symplectic-topological invariants and link invariants (Floer homology and Khovanov homology) and connections to representation theory (Fukaya category and parabolic category O), thus summarising results by Abouzaid,
Seidel, Smith and Mak on the subject.