Igor Belegradek

Using fiber bundle theory and conformal mappings, we continuously select a point from the interior of Jordan domains in Riemannian surfaces. This selection can be made equivariant under isometries, and take on prescribed values such as the…

Let $W$ be a compact smooth $4$-manifold that deformation retract to a PL embedded closed surface. One can arrange the embedding to have at most one non-locally-flat point, and near the point the topology of the embedding is encoded in the…

We give examples of open manifolds that carry infinitely many complete metrics of nonnegative sectional curvature such that they all have the same soul, and their isometry classes lie in different connected components of the moduli space.…

We show that the hyperbolization of polyhedra pulls back regular neighborhoods of PL submanifolds. Applying this to the Riemannian version of the hyperbolization due to Ontaneda gives open complete manifolds of pinched negative curvature…

We prove the existence of a center, or continuous selection of a point, in the relative interior of $C^1$ embedded $k$-disks in Riemannian $n$-manifolds. If $k\le 3$ the center can be made equivariant with respect to the isometries of the…

We show that certain aspherical manifolds arising from hyperplane arrangements in negatively curved manifolds have relatively hyperbolic fundamental group.

We give short proofs of the following two facts: Iterated principal circle bundles are precisely the nilmanifolds. Every iterated circle bundle is almost flat, and hence diffeomorphic to an infranilmanifold.

We apply various topological methods to distinguish connected components of moduli spaces of complete Riemannian metrics of nonnegative sectional curvature on open manifolds. The new geometric ingredient is that souls of nearby…

We use an index-theoretic technique of Hitchin to show that the space of complete Riemannian metrics of nonnegative sectional curvature on certain open spin manifolds has nontrivial homotopy groups in infinitely many degrees. A new…

We establish a link between rational homotopy theory and the problem which vector bundles admit complete Riemannian metric of nonnegative sectional curvature. As an application, we show for a large class of simply-connected nonnegatively…

We study topological properties of the Gromov-Hausdorff metric on the set of isometry classes of nonnegatively curved $2$-spheres.

We determine the homeomorphism type of the hyperspace of positively curved $C^\infty$ convex bodies in $\mathbb R^n$, and derive various properties of its quotient by the group of Euclidean isometries. We make a systematic study of…

We study algebraic conditions on a group G under which every properly discontinuous, isometric G-action on a Hadamard manifold has a G-invariant Busemann function. For such G we prove the following structure theorem: every open complete…

Can the Minkowski sum of two compact convex bodies be made smoother by rotating one of them? We construct two infinitely differentiable strictly convex plane bodies such that after any generic rotation (in the Baire category sense) of one…

We determine the homeomorphism type of the space of smooth complete nonnegatively curved metrics on surfaces of positive Euler characteristic equipped with the topology of $C^\gamma$ uniform convergence on compact sets, when $\gamma$ is…

Let V be an open manifold with complete nonnegatively curved metric such that the normal sphere bundle to a soul has no section. We prove that the souls of nearby nonnegatively curved metrics on V are smoothly close. Combining this result…

We study the space of complete Riemannian metrics of nonnegative curvature on the plane equipped with the C^k topology. If k is infinite, we show that the space is homeomorphic to the separable Hilbert space. For any k we prove that the…

For each nonnegative integer we find an open (4m+9)-dimensional simply-connected manifold admitting complete nonnegatively curved metrics whose souls are non-diffeomorphic, homeomorphic, and have codimension 2. We give a diffeomorphism…

We obtain some restrictions on the topology of infinite volume hyperbolic manifolds. In particular, for any n and any closed negatively curved manifold M of dimension greater than 2, only finitely many hyperbolic n-manifolds are total…

We show that any open aspherical manifold of dimension n>3 is tangentially homotopy equivalent to an n-manifold whose universal cover is not homeomorphic to the Euclidean space.