Related papers: Fundamental groups of aspherical manifolds and map…

We prove that rationally essential manifolds with suitably large fundamental groups do not admit any maps of non-zero degree from products of closed manifolds of positive dimension. Particular examples include all manifolds of non-positive…

We prove that every finitely generated group with recursive aspherical presentation embeds into a group with finite aspherical presentation. This and several known facts about groups and manifolds imply that there exists a 4-dimensional…

It is an important question whether it is possible to put a geometry on a given manifold or not. It is well known that any simply connected closed manifold admitting a real projective structure must be a sphere. Therefore, any simply…

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 define cusp-decomposable manifolds and prove smooth rigidity within this class of manifolds. These manifolds generally do not admit a nonpositively curved metric but can be decomposed into pieces that are diffeomorphic to finite volume,…

By recognizing them as fundamental groups of developable complexes of groups we prove that mapping class groups of compact orientable surfaces have finite asymptotic dimension.

For oriented connected closed manifolds of the same dimension, there is a transitive relation: $M$ dominates $N$, or $M \ge N$, if there exists a continuous map of non-zero degree from $M$ onto $N$. Section 1 is a reminder on the notion of…

We show that the fundamental groups of any two closed irreducible non-geometric graph-manifolds are quasi-isometric. This answers a question of Kapovich and Leeb. We also classify the quasi-isometry types of fundamental groups of…

We study aspherical manifolds that do not support Anosov diffeomorphisms. Weakening conditions of Gogolev and Lafont, we show that the product of an infranilmanifold with finitely many aspherical manifolds whose fundamental groups have…

In every dimension $n\ge 3$ we introduce a class of orthogonal graph-manifolds and prove that the fundamental group of any orthogonal graph-manifold quasi-isometrically embeds into a product of $n$ trees. As a consequence, we obtain that…

Given a 2-manifold, a fundamental question to ask is which groups can be realized as the isometry group of a Riemannan metric of constant curvature on the manifold. In this paper, we give a nearly complete classification of such groups for…

The main subjects of the paper is studying the fundamental groups of closed symplectically aspherical manifolds. Motivated by some results of Gompf, we introduce two classes of fundamental groups $\pi_1(M)$ of symplectically aspherical…

We give the first examples of rationally inessential but macroscopically large manifolds. Our manifolds are counterexamples to the Dranishnikov rationality conjecture. For some of them we prove that they do not admit a metric of positive…

Special generic maps are higher dimensional versions of Morse functions with exactly two singular points, characterizing spheres topologically except $4$-dimensional cases: in these cases standard spheres are characterized. Canonical…

We present a construction that produces infinite classes of K\"ahler groups that arise as fundamental groups of fibres of maps to higher dimensional tori. Following the work of Delzant and Gromov, there is great interest in knowing which…

In various classes of infinite groups, we identify groups that are presentable by products, i.e. groups having finite index subgroups which are quotients of products of two commuting infinite subgroups. The classes we discuss here include…

We use differential forms on loop spaces to prove that the fundamental group of certain geometric transformation groups is infinite. Examples include both finite and infinite dimensional Lie groups. The finite dimensional examples are the…

A myriad of irreducible symplectic 4-manifolds with abelian non-cyclic fundamental group is constructed. The botany of manifolds with finite non-cyclic fundamental groups is also studied.

For each integer n\ge 2, we construct an irreducible, smooth, complex projective variety M of dimension n, whose fundamental group has infinitely generated homology in degree n+1 and whose universal cover is a Stein manifold, homotopy…

We define \emph{piecewise rank 1} manifolds, which are aspherical manifolds that generally do not admit a nonpositively curved metric but can be decomposed into pieces that are diffeomorphic to finite volume, irreducible, locally symmetric,…