In this article we study the Kähler–Ricci flow, the corresponding parabolic Monge–Ampère equation and complete non-compact Kähler–Ricci flat manifolds. Our main result states that if (M,g) is sufficiently close to being Kähler–Ricci flat in a suitable sense, then the Kähler–Ricci flow has a long time smooth solution g(t) converging smoothly uniformly on compact sets to a complete Kähler–Ricci flat metric on M. The main step is to obtain a uniform C0-estimate for the corresponding parabolic Monge–Ampère equation. Our results on this can be viewed as parabolic versions of the main results of Tian and Yau [Complete Kähler manifolds with zero Ricci curvature. II, Invent. Math. 106 (1990), 27–60] on the elliptic Monge–Ampère equation.

As shown by Gluck in 1962, the diffeotopy group of S1×S2 is isomorphic to ℤ2⊕ℤ2 ⊕ℤ2. Here an alternative proof of this result is given, relying on contact topology. We then discuss two applications to contact topology: (i) it is shown that the fundamental group of the space of contact structures on S1×S2, based at the standard tight contact structure, is isomorphic to ℤ; (ii) inspired by previous work of Fraser, an example is given of an integer family of Legendrian knots in S1×S2#S1×S2 (with its standard tight contact structure) that can be distinguished with the help of contact surgery, but not by the classical invariants (topological knot type, Thurston–Bennequin invariant, and rotation number).