It is by now a classical topic in index theory to study on a (closed) Riemannian (spin) manifold the space of all Riemannian metrics of positive scalar curvature. We have several results showing that this space is usually highly complicated from a homotopy theoretic point of view (provided it is non-empty). Instead of studying positivity … Continue reading "Spaces of positively curved Riemannian metrics"

Recently I saw some papers on the arXiv on conjugation curvature of finitely generated groups (also called medium-scale curvature, transportation curvature, metric Ricci curvature or comparison curvature for Cayley graphs). I got a bit interested in it and so decided to write up a short post about it. Let \(G\) be a finitely generated group … Continue reading "Conjugation Curvature"

Given a natural number n, the Collatz sequence it generates is the following: if n is even, then divide it by 2, if n is odd, then multiply it by 3 and add 1; and now iterate this procedure. The Collatz conjecture states that you will always end up with the number 1 after finitely … Continue reading "Collatz conjecture"

A week ago there was a preprint posted on the arXiv by Peter Haïssinsky and Cyril Lecuire about Quasi-isometric rigidity of three manifold groups (arXiv:2005.06813). Building on work by many other people, they complete the proof that the class of 3-manifold groups is quasi-isometrically rigid, meaning the following: if a finitely generated group G is quasi-isometric … Continue reading "Large scale properties of 3-manifold groups"