Summary of progress on the Blaschke conjecture

The Blaschke conjecture claims that every compact Riemannian manifold whose injectivity radius equals its diameter is, up to constant rescaling, a compact rank one symmetric space. We summarize the intuition behind this problem, the proof that such manifolds have the cohomology of compact rank one symmetric spaces, and the proof of the conjecture for homology spheres and homology real projective spaces. We also summarize what is known on the diffeomorphism, homeomorphism and homotopy types of such manifolds.Comment: 21 page

Nonlinear Gravitons, Null Geodesics, and Holomorphic Disks

We develop a global twistor correspondence for pseudo-Riemannian conformal structures of signature (++--) with self-dual Weyl curvature. Near the conformal class of the standard indefinite product metric on S^2 x S^2, there is an infinite-dimensional moduli space of such conformal structures, and each of these has the surprising global property that its null geodesics are all periodic. Each such conformal structure arises from a family of holomorphic disks in CP_3 with boundary on some totally real embedding of RP^3 into CP_3. An interesting sub-class of these conformal structures are represented by scalar-flat indefinite K\"ahler metrics, and our methods give particularly sharp results in this more restrictive setting.Comment: 56 pages, LaTeX2

A direct approach to quaternionic manifolds

The recent definition of slice regular function of several quaternionic variables suggests a new notion of quaternionic manifold. We give the definition of quaternionic regular manifold, as a space locally modeled on $\mathbb{H}^n$, in a slice regular sense. We exhibit some significant classes of examples, including manifolds which carry a quaternionic affine structure.Comment: 13 page