This article establishes a sufficient condition for Kobayashi hyperbolicity of unbounded domains in terms of curvature. Specifically, when $\Omega\subset{\mathbb C}^{n}$ corresponds to a sub-level set of a smooth, real-valued function $\Psi$, such that the form $\omega = {\bf i}\partial\bar{\partial}\Psi$ is Kähler and has bounded curvature outside a bounded subset, then this domain admits a hermitian metric of strictly negative holomorphic sectional curvature.

Maximum principles for subharmonic functions in the framework of quasi-regular local semi-Dirichlet forms admitting lower bounds are presented. As applications, we give weak and strong maximum principles for (local) subsolutions of a second order elliptic differential operator on the domain of Euclidean space under conditions on coefficients, which partially generalize the results by Stampacchia.

The norm on a Banach space gives rise to a subharmonic function on the complex plane for which the distributional Laplacian gives a Riesz measure. This measure is calculated explicitly here for Lebesgue $L^p$ spaces and the von~Neumann-Schatten trace ideals. Banach spaces that are $q$-uniformly $\PL$-convex in the sense of Davis, Garling and Tomczak-Jaegermann are characterized in terms of the mass distribution of this measure. This gives a new proof that the trace ideals $c^p$ are $2$-uniformly $\PL$-convex for $1\leq p\leq 2$.