Bounds on sectional curvature and interactions with topology (Q2657828)

The article is a survey on the questions `What implications on the topology of a manifold do bounds on curvature have?' and `What topological obstructions exist against the existence of Riemannian metrics with certain curvature bounds?' The author discusses at first examples of non-negative and positive sectional curvature mainly on symmetric spaces and connected sums thereof, and then discusses several conjectures related to formality and rational ellipticity. In the third section, positive curvature is discussed in relation to symmetry and to geometric formality. The fourth section is devoted to two-sided curvature bounds and the fifth section to open manifold of non-negative curvature. The article contains many examples, some (sketches of) proofs and a whole lot of open questions.