A sharp estimate of the extinction time for the mean curvature flow

Abstract

We establish a pointwise comparison result for a nonlinear degenerate elliptic Dirichlet problem using an isoperimetric inequality involving the total mean curvature. In particular this result provides a sharp estimate for the extinction time of a class of compact surfaces, wider than the convex one, moving by mean curvature flow. Finally we present numerical experiments to compare our estimate with those known in literature.