This volume presents a complete and self-contained description of new results in the theory of manifolds of nonpositive curvature. It is based on lectures delivered by M. Gromov at the Collège de France in Paris. Therefore this book may also serve as an introduction to the subject of nonpositively curved manifolds. The latest progress in this area is reflected in the article of W. Ballmann describing the structure of manifolds of higher rank.

Starting from the foundations, the author presents an almost entirely self-contained treatment of differentiable spaces of nonpositive curvature, focusing on the symmetric spaces in which every geodesic lies in a flat Euclidean space of dimension at least two. The book builds to a discussion of the Mostow Rigidity Theorem and its generalizations, and concludes by exploring the relationship in nonpositively curved spaces between geometric and algebraic properties of the fundamental group. This introduction to the geometry of symmetric spaces of non-compact type will serve as an excellent guide for graduate students new to the material, and will also be a useful reference text for mathematicians already familiar with the subject.

The present book contains the lecture notes from a "Nachdiplomvorlesung", a topics course adressed to Ph. D. students, at the ETH ZUrich during the winter term 95/96. Consequently, these notes are arranged according to the requirements of organizing the material for oral exposition, and the level of difficulty and the exposition were adjusted to the audience in Zurich. The aim of the course was to introduce some geometric and analytic concepts that have been found useful in advancing our understanding of spaces of nonpos itive curvature. In particular in recent years, it has been realized that often it is useful for a systematic understanding not to restrict the attention to Riemannian manifolds only, but to consider more general classes of metric spaces of generalized nonpositive curvature. The basic idea is to isolate a property that on one hand can be formulated solely in terms of the distance function and on the other hand is characteristic of nonpositive sectional curvature on a Riemannian manifold, and then to take this property as an axiom for defining a metric space of nonposi tive curvature. Such constructions have been put forward by Wald, Alexandrov, Busemann, and others, and they will be systematically explored in Chapter 2. Our focus and treatment will often be different from the existing literature. In the first Chapter, we consider several classes of examples of Riemannian manifolds of nonpositive curvature, and we explain how conditions about nonpos itivity or negativity of curvature can be exploited in various geometric contexts.

Singular spaces with upper curvature bounds and, in particular, spaces of nonpositive curvature, have been of interest in many fields, including geometric (and combinatorial) group theory, topology, dynamical systems and probability theory. In the first two chapters of the book, a concise introduction into these spaces is given, culminating in the Hadamard-Cartan theorem and the discussion of the ideal boundary at infinity for simply connected complete spaces of nonpositive curvature. In the third chapter, qualitative properties of the geodesic flow on geodesically complete spaces of nonpositive curvature are discussed, as are random walks on groups of isometries of nonpositively curved spaces. The main class of spaces considered should be precisely complementary to symmetric spaces of higher rank and Euclidean buildings of dimension at least two (Rank Rigidity conjecture). In the smooth case, this is known and is the content of the Rank Rigidity theorem. An updated version of the proof of the latter theorem (in the smooth case) is presented in Chapter IV of the book. This chapter contains also a short introduction into the geometry of the unit tangent bundle of a Riemannian manifold and the basic facts about the geodesic flow. In an appendix by Misha Brin, a self-contained and short proof of the ergodicity of the geodesic flow of a compact Riemannian manifold of negative curvature is given. The proof is elementary and should be accessible to the non-specialist. Some of the essential features and problems of the ergodic theory of smooth dynamical systems are discussed, and the appendix can serve as an introduction into this theory.

A description of the global properties of simply-connected spaces that are non-positively curved in the sense of A. D. Alexandrov, and the structure of groups which act on such spaces by isometries. The theory of these objects is developed in a manner accessible to anyone familiar with the rudiments of topology and group theory: non-trivial theorems are proved by concatenating elementary geometric arguments, and many examples are given. Part I provides an introduction to the geometry of geodesic spaces, while Part II develops the basic theory of spaces with upper curvature bounds. More specialized topics, such as complexes of groups, are covered in Part III.

This text focuses on developing an intimate acquaintance with the geometric meaning of curvature and thereby introduces and demonstrates all the main technical tools needed for a more advanced course on Riemannian manifolds. It covers proving the four most fundamental theorems relating curvature and topology: the Gauss-Bonnet Theorem, the Cartan-Hadamard Theorem, Bonnet’s Theorem, and a special case of the Cartan-Ambrose-Hicks Theorem.

This text focuses on developing an intimate acquaintance with the geometric meaning of curvature and thereby introduces and demonstrates all the main technical tools needed for a more advanced course on Riemannian manifolds. It covers proving the four most fundamental theorems relating curvature and topology: the Gauss-Bonnet Theorem, the Cartan-Hadamard Theorem, Bonnet’s Theorem, and a special case of the Cartan-Ambrose-Hicks Theorem.