Shape of manifolds with positive Ricci curvature (Q1911139)

The main result of the paper is the following Theorem. Given an integer \(n\geq 2\) and \(\varepsilon>0\), there exists \(\delta=\delta(n,\varepsilon)>0\) such that if \(M\) is an \(n\)-dimensional closed Riemannian manifold with \(\text{Ric}\geq n-1\) and \(\text{Vol}(M)\geq \text{Vol}(S^n)-\delta\), then the Gromov-Hausdorff distance between \(M\) and \(S^n\) is at most \(\varepsilon\). A converse to this theorem is proved by the same author in [ibid., 193-214 (1996; Zbl 0871.53028), see the following review]. The idea of proof is to construct a map \(M\to\mathbb{R}^{n+1}\) which maps \(M\) close to the standard sphere. The map is obtained by composing distance functions from suitable points in \(M\) with a cosine. This mimicks the standard imbedding of \(S^n\subset \mathbb{R}^{n+1}\). The main technical tool is an ``\(L^2\)-Toponogov theorem'' which roughly says the following: Suppose \(M\) is an \(n\)-dimensional closed Riemannian manifold with \(\text{Ric}\geq n-1\). Let \(q\in M\) be a point for which there exists another point of distance almost \(\pi\) apart. For any geodesic \(\gamma\) of fixed length \(\ell\), let \(\Delta\) be a geodesic triangle with this geodesic the side opposite the vertex \(p\) and let \(\underline\Delta\) be the comparison triangle in the standard sphere. Furthermore, let \(d_t\) be the distance between \(\gamma(t)\) and \(p\), and \(\underline{d}_t\) the corresponding distance on the sphere. Then in an \(L^2\)-sense \(d_t\) is almost equal to \(\underline{d}_t\).