Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

Comparison geometry studies Riemannian manifolds with a given curvature bound.  This minicourse is an introduction to volume comparison (as developed by Bishop and Gromov), which is fundamental in understanding manifolds with a lower bound on Ricci curvature. Prerequisites are very modest: we only need basics of Riemannian geometry, and fluency with fundamental groups and metric spaces. In the first (2 hour) lecture I shall explain what volume comparison is and derive several applications.