English

Non-uniqueness of geodesic limits and a question of Grayson and Gage

Differential Geometry 2026-08-05 v1 Analysis of PDEs

Abstract

Grayson and Gage proved that an immortal curve shortening flow of simple closed curves on a closed surface converges subsequentially to a closed geodesic, and they asked whether this limiting geodesic is unique. We answer this question negatively by constructing a smooth Riemannian metric on S2\mathbb{S}^2 and an immortal simple closed curve shortening flow that converges along different sequences of times to every geodesic in a one-parameter family of distinct simple closed geodesics.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2608.04855,
  title  = {Non-uniqueness of geodesic limits and a question of Grayson and Gage},
  author = {Shrey Aryan and Tang-Kai Lee},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2608.04855},
  year   = {2026}
}

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32 Pages