Perelman's functional and reduced volume

Abstract

In recent years, there has seen much interest and increased research activities on Perelman's paper. Section one and two of this paper aim to establish Perelman's local non-collapsing result for the Ricci flow. This will provide a positive lower bound on the injectivity radius for the Ricci flow under blow-up analysis. We also discuss the gradient flow formalism of the Ricci flow and Perelman's motivation from physics. In this paper, we survey some of the recent progress on Perelman's functional, reduced volume and reduced length.