Jin-Ichi Itoh

It is well known since Jacobi that the geodesic flow of the ellipsoid is "completely integrable", which means that the geodesic orbits are described in a certain explicit way. However, it does not directly indicate that any global behavior of the geodesics becomes easy to see. In fact, it happened quite recently that a proof for the statement "The conjugate locus of a general point in two-dimensional ellipsoid has just four cusps" in Jacobi's Vorlesungen \"uber dynamik appeared in the literature. In this paper, we consider Liouville manifolds, a certain class of Riemannian manifolds which contains ellipsoids. We solve the geodesic equations; investigate the behavior of the Jacobi fields, especially the positions of the zeros; and clarify the structure of the conjugate locus of a general point. In particular, we show that the singularities arising in the conjugate loci are only cuspidal edges and $D_4^+$ Lagrangian singularities, which would be the higher dimensional counterpart of Jacobi's statement.

We show that, in the sense of Baire category, most Alexandrov surfaces with curvature bounded below by $\kappa$ have no conical points. We use this result to prove that at most points of such surfaces, the lower and the upper Gaussian curvatures are equal to $\kappa$ and $\infty$ respectively.

We prove that every connected graph can be realized as the cut locus of some point on some Riemannian surface $S$ which, in some cases, has constant curvature. We study the stability of such realizations, and their generic behavior.

We showed in another paper [arXiv:1103.1759] that every connected graph can be realized as the cut locus of some point on some riemannian surface $S$. Here, criteria for the orientability of $S$ are given, and are applied to classify the distinct, orientable, cut locus structures on graphs with four generating cycles.