Exotic spheres with lots of positive curvatures (Q5950195)

In this interesting paper the author proves the following result: ``The exotic 7-spheres that are total spaces of \(S^3\)-bundles over \(S^4\) all admit sequences of almost nonnegatively curved Riemannian metrics that have positive sectional curvature at a point and an effective, isometric \(\text{O}(2)\times \text{SO}(3)\)-action''. This means that these spheres admit sequences of Riemannian metrics \(g_i\) so that (1) \(\text{sec}(g_i)\geq -{1\over i}\); (2) \(\dim(g_i)\leq 1\); (3) \(\text{sec}(g_i)> 1\) at a point. As described by the author, the paper is motivated by the following intriguing question of global Riemannian geometry: ``Which closed, smooth \(n\)-manifolds admit Riemannian metrics with positive (or nonnegative) sectional curvature?'' Some examples are known and their construction is related to or makes use of the well-known formulas of O'Neill for the curvature of the total space, the fibres and the base space of a Riemannian submersion. These formulas imply at once that the image of a Riemannian submersion of a positively curved manifold is positively curved. A kind of converse would be very helpful for the construction of many more examples: When does the total space of a fibre bundle whose base and fibre are positively curved admit a metric with positive curvature? The case of \(S^3\)-bundles over \(S^4\) is an important special case and this class of manifolds contains 16 of the 28 oriented diffeomorphism classes of exotic 7-spheres among their total spaces.