The Ricci flow in Riemannian geometry. A complete proof of the differentiable 1/4-pinching sphere theorem (Q609065)

As the title indicates, the book is a self-contained exposition culminating in Simon Brendle's and Richard Schoen's proof of a famous conjecture stating: A complete, simply connected \(n\)-dimensional Riemannian manifold with its sectional curvatures strictly between \(1\) and \(4\) is diffeomorphic to an \(n\) sphere. As the tools used heavily involve the Ricci flow, the book is dedicated almost entirely to the analysis of the Ricci flow, viewed first as a heat type equation hence its consequences, and later from the more recent developments due to Perelman's monotonicity formulas and the blow-up analysis of the flow which was made thus possible. The final part is based on Böhm-Wilking and Brendle-Schoen results on the convergence of the Ricci flow in \(n\)-dimensions. To be exact, there is one result the proof of which is not included and that is the Cheeger-Gromov compactness theorem for Riemannian metrics; yet everything else is not only covered, but also intuitively explained or otherwise motivated, among which, particularly nicely explained, Perelman's motivation from physics for his gradient flow formalism for the Ricci flow. The latter can be found in Chapters 9 and 10 which are built toward establishing Perelman's local non-collapsing result for the Ricci flow. Chapters 11 and 12 are based on work of Böhm and Wilking in which it is proved that a whole family of preserved convex sets for the Ricci flow is derived from an initial one. In Chapter 13, it is shown that the positive isotropic curvature (PIC) condition is preserved by the Ricci flow. In fact, the proof uses existing ideas but the simpler version included here is due to the authors. Noticed by Brendle and Schoen, the PIC condition on \(M \times \mathbb{R}^2\) is related to the \(1/4\)-pinching condition of the sphere theorem whose proof is presented in the next, and last, chapter. Chapters 1--7 present more classical results regarding the Ricci flow (short-time existence, Uhlenbeck trick, maximum principle), while Chapter 8 looks for a compactness theorem for sequences of solutions to the Ricci flow. Nevertheless, this more classical part does not make the book less interesting, on the contrary, it facilitates the later reading which, overall, is very enjoyable for specialists and non-specialists (of curvature flows) alike.