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Geometry-Topology Seminar

Thursday, April 5, 2007 - 4:30pm

Larry Guth

Stanford University

Location

University of Pennsylvania

DRL 4C8

In the 80's, Gromov made several conjectures about the volumes of balls in Riemannian manifolds. The spirit of the conjectures is that if a Riemannian manifold is "large", then it should contain a unit ball whose volume is not too small. For example, if you take the standard metric on the n-sphere and increase it pointwise to form a new metric, then Gromov's conjecture implies that the new metric should contain a unit ball whose volume is bounded below by a constant c(n). I proved some of the conjectures, including this one. I will explain the conjectures and give some context, and then I will try to say something about the proof.