In the last 15 years, White and Huisken‐Sinestrari developed a far‐reaching structure theory for the mean curvature flow of mean convex hypersurfaces. Their papers provide a package of estimates and structural results that yield a precise description of singularities and of high‐curvature regions in a mean convex flow. In the present paper, we give a new treatment of the theory of mean convex (and k‐convex) flows. This includes: (1) an estimate for derivatives of curvatures, (2) a convexity estimate, (3) a cylindrical estimate, (4) a global convergence theorem, (5) a structure theorem for ancient solutions, and (6) a partial regularity theorem. Our new proofs are both more elementary and substantially shorter than the original arguments. Our estimates are local and universal. A key ingredient in our new approach is the new noncollapsing result of Andrews [2]. Some parts are also inspired by the work of Perelman [32,33]. In a forthcoming paper [17], we will give a new construction of mean curvature flow with surgery based on the methods established in the present paper. Note added in May 2015. Since the first version of this paper was posted on arxiv in April 2013, the estimates have been used to construct mean convex flow with surgery in ℝ3 by Brendle and Huisken [5] in September 2013 and in another paper by the authors in April 2014.© 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

We give a new proof for the existence of mean curvature flow with surgery of 2-convex hypersurfaces in $R^N$, as announced in arXiv:1304.0926. Our proof works for all $N \geq 3$, including mean convex surfaces in $R^3$. We also derive a priori estimates for a more general class of flows in a local and flexible setting

We prove precompactness in an orbifold Cheeger-Gromov sense of complete gradient Ricci shrinkers with a lower bound on their entropy and a local integral Riemann bound. We do not need any pointwise curvature assumptions, volume or diameter bounds. In dimension four, under a technical assumption, we can replace the local integral Riemann bound by an upper bound for the Euler characteristic. The proof relies on a Gauss-Bonnet with cutoff argument.

In this short article, we prove the existence of ancient solutions of the mean curvature flow that for t → 0 collapse to a round point, but for t → −∞ become more and more oval: near the center they have asymptotic shrinkers modeled on round cylinders S j × R n−j and near the tips they have asymptotic translators modeled on Bowl j+1 × R n−j−1 . We also give a characterization of the round shrinking sphere among ancient α-Andrews flows. Our proofs are based on the recent estimates of Haslhofer-Kleiner [HK13].

We prove that any translating soliton for the mean curvature flow which is noncollapsed and uniformly 2-convex must be the rotationally symmetric bowl soliton. In particular, this proves a conjecture of White and Wang, in the 2-convex case in arbitrary dimension