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We now turn to Perelman’s second scale-invariant monotone quantity for Ricci flow, now known as the Perelman reduced volume. We saw in the previous lecture that the monotonicity for Perelman entropy was ultimately derived (after some twists and turns) from the monotonicity of a potential under gradient flow. In this lecture, we will show (at a heuristic level only) how the monotonicity of Perelman’s reduced volume can also be “derived”, in a formal sense, from another source of monotonicity, namely the relative Bishop-Gromov inequality in comparison geometry (which has already been alluded to in previous lectures). Interestingly, in order to obtain this connection, one must first reinterpret parabolic flows such as Ricci flow as the limit of a certain high-dimensional Riemannian manifold as the dimension becomes infinite; this is part of a more general philosophy that parabolic theory is in some sense an infinite-dimensional limit of elliptic theory. Our treatment here is a (liberally reinterpreted) version of Section 6 of Perelman’s paper.

In the next few lectures we shall give a rigorous proof of this monotonicity, without using the infinite-dimensional limit and instead using results related to the Li-Yau-Hamilton Harnack inequality. (There are several other approaches to understanding Perelman’s reduced volume, such as Lott’s formulation based on optimal transport, but we will restrict attention in this course to the methods that are in Perelman’s original paper.)