Fibrations of spheres by parallel great spheres and Berger's rigidity theorem (Q1101698)

An elementary proof of the following theorem is given. Theorem. If an open set in a round sphere is filled by pieces of parallel great spheres, then that filling is a portion of a Hopf fibration. This result is used to give a direct constructive proof of Berger's rigidity theorem: Let M be a complete, connected, simply connected Riemannian manifold with sectional curvatures \(1\leq K\leq 4\) and diameter \(\pi/2\). Then M is isometric to a round sphere of radius 1/2 or to a projective space with its canonical metric.