Speaker: Tam Nguyen Phan (Binghamton U.)
Title: Examples of negatively curved and nonpositively curved manifolds
Abstract: Let M be a noncompact, complete, Riemannian manifold. Gromov proved that if the sectional curvature of M negative and bounded, and if the volume of M is finite, then M is homeomorphic to the interior of a compact manifold overline{M} with boundary B. In other words, M has finitely many ends, and each end of M is topologically a product of a closed manifold C with a ray. A natural question is how the geometry (i.e. in terms of the curvature) of M controls the topology of C. The same question is interesting in nonpositive curvature settings. I will discuss what topological restrictions there are on each end and give old and new constructions of such manifolds.