Differential Harnack inequalities via Concavity of the arrival time

We present a simple connection between differential Harnack inequalities for hypersurface flows and natural concavity properties of their time-of-arrival functions. We prove these concavity properties directly for a large class of flows by applying a concavity maximum principle argument to the corresponding level set flow equations. In particular, this yields a short proof of Hamilton’s differential Harnack inequality for mean curvature flow and, more generally, Andrews’ differential Harnack inequalities for certain “$\alpha$-inverse-concave” flows.