We prove that $S^2\times S^3$ admits a Riemannian metric with positive sectional curvature. We view it as a principal circle bundle over $S^2\times S^2$. A diagonal Cheeger deformation of the base and a connection whose curvature form vanishes on the remaining flat tori yield a nonnegatively curved connection metric whose zero-curvature planes are the horizontal lifts of the tangent planes to those tori. We then perturb this metric by the real part of a global complex-valued symmetric $2$-tensor. Differentiation along the circle fibers produces a trace-free first variation of the second fundamental form on local horizontal lifts of the flat tori. The Gauss equation converts this into a positive second-order curvature term that dominates as the fibers shrink. A quantitative lower bound for the Hessian in directions normal to the set of zero-curvature planes extends this positivity to nearby planes. The metric and the proof are discovered by the Odin Automatic AI Research Agent.
We prove that the exotic smooth $8$-sphere and both oriented homotopy $10$-spheres representing elements of order three admit Riemannian metrics with strictly positive sectional curvature. The construction combines Speran\c{c}a's special $S^3$-$S^3$ bundle models with the compatible-disk construction of He, Liu and Yau...
We construct a metric on $S^2 \times S^2$ with positive sectional curvature. Starting from the standard metric on $S^2 \times S^2$, we first perform a Cheeger deformation. The resulting metric has nonnegative sectional curvature. We refer to it as a Cheeger-M\"uter metric. We then consider a suitable third order pertur...
Let $n\geq3$ and $0\leq\tau\leq2$. We prove that every smooth closed connected immersed hypersurface in hyperbolic space whose induced metric has positive $\tau$-bi-Ricci curvature admits a mean curvature flow with surgery which has only finitely many surgery times and terminates. In the range compatible with cylindric...
Branson's $Q$-curvature is a natural fourth-order counterpart of scalar curvature in conformal geometry. In analogy with the classical recovery of the Ricci tensor from the linearized scalar curvature, Lin and Yuan introduced a symmetric $2$-tensor $J_g$ through the formal adjoint of the linearized $Q$-curvature and es...
For every integer $m\geq 3$, we construct a smooth Riemannian metric $g$ on a manifold diffeomorphic to $S^m$ such that $\text{sec}_g\geq 0$, every sectional curvature is strictly positive away from a closed nowhere-dense set, and the point locus on which some sectional curvature vanishes has Hausdorff dimension exactl...
We study the construction of positively curved Riemannian metrics by non-isometric circle actions. For a family of homotopy eleven-spheres whose Eells--Kuiper invariants form the even subgroup of $\mathbb{Z}/992$, we construct, on each member, a smooth background metric $q$ and three effective circle actions with gener...
