Related papers: Pontryagin numbers and nonnegative curvature

We say that a nonnegatively curved manifold $(M,g)$ has quarter pinched flag curvature if for any two planes which intersect in a line the ratio of their sectional curvature is bounded above by 4. We show that these manifolds have…

In this paper, we study the existence of high-dimensional, closed, smooth manifolds whose rational homotopy type resembles that of a projective plane. Applying rational surgery, the problem can be reduced to finding possible Pontryagin…

We study the boundary and lens rigidity problems on domains without assuming the convexity of the boundary. We show that such rigidities hold when the domain is a simply connected compact Riemannian surface without conjugate points. For the…

In this paper, we develop a new index theory for manifolds with polyhedral boundary. As an application, we prove Gromov's dihedral extremality conjecture regarding comparisons of scalar curvatures, mean curvatures and dihedral angles…

We prove families of uniform $(L^r,L^s)$ resolvent estimates for simply connected manifolds of constant curvature (negative or positive) that imply the earlier ones for Euclidean space of Kenig, Ruiz and the second author \cite{KRS}. In the…

Combining several previously known arguments, we prove marked length spectrum rigidity for surfaces with nonpositively curved Riemannian metrics away from a finite set of cone-type singularities with cone angles $>2\pi$. With an additional…

Understanding the relationships between geometry and topology is a central theme in Riemannian geometry. We establish two results on the fundamental groups of open (complete and noncompact) $n$-manifolds with nonnegative Ricci curvature and…

Gromov conjectured that the total mean curvature of the boundary of a compact Riemannian manifold can be estimated from above by a constant depending only on the boundary metric and on a lower bound for the scalar curvature of the fill-in.…

We consider closed acylindrical surfaces in 3-manifolds and in knot and link complements, and show that the genus of these surfaces is bounded linearly by the number of tetrahedra in the triangulation of the manifold and by the number of…

Let $L$ be a prime alternating link with $n$ crossings. We show that for each fixed $g$, the number of genus $g$ incompressible surfaces in the complement of $L$ is bounded by a polynomial in $n$. Previous bounds were exponential in $n$.

We provide the optimal linear bound for the signature of positive four-braids in terms of the three-genus of their closures. As a consequence, we improve previously known linear bounds for the signature in terms of the first Betti number…

We exhibit, for n at least 5, infinitely many quadratic number fields admitting unramified degree n extensions with prescribed signature whose normal closures have Galois group A_n. This generalizes a result of Uchida and Yamamoto, which…

In this paper, we prove several rigidity results for complete noncompact manifolds with nonnegative intermediate curvatures. We show that when either $3\leq n\leq 5$, $1\leq m\leq n-1$, or $6\leq n\leq 7$, $m\in \{1,n-1,n-2\}$, any manifold…

We study noncompact, complete, finite volume, Riemannian 4-manifolds $M$ with sectional curvature $-1<K<0$. We prove that $\pi_1 M$ cannot be a 3-manifold group. A classical theorem of Gromov says that $M$ is homeomorphic to the interior of…

We study the topology of Lagrangian submanifolds in standard symplectic vector spaces $\mathbb{C}^n$ using ideas from open-closed string topology. Specifically, for a closed, oriented, spin Lagrangian $L$, we construct a (possibly curved)…

Given a closed, oriented Lagrangian submanifold $L$ in a Liouville domain $\overline{M}$, one can define a Maurer-Cartan element with respect to a certain $L_\infty$-structure on the string homology…

It is proved that the fundamental group of a complete Riemannian manifold with nonnegative Ricci curvature and certain volume growth conditions is trivial or finite.

On a compact oriented surface of genus $g$ with $n\geq 1$ boundary components, $\delta_1, \delta_2,\ldots, \delta_n$, we consider positive factorizations of the boundary multitwist $t_{\delta_1} t_{\delta_2} \cdots t_{\delta_n}$, where…

We construct several infinite families of nonnegatively curved manifolds of low cohomogeneity and small dimension which can be distinguished by their cohomology rings. In particular, we exhibit an infinite family of eight-dimensional…

Given a simply connected manifold $M$, we completely determine which rational monomial Pontryagin numbers are attained by fiber homotopy trivial $M$-bundles over the $k$-sphere, provided that $k$ is small compared to the dimension of $M$.…