Rays and souls in von Mangoldt planes (Q692387)

A von Mangoldt plane is a surface diffeomorphic to \(\mathbb R^2\) with smooth complete Riemannian metric, rotationally symmetric about some point, and with Gauss curvature not increasing as a function of the distance from that point, like a bindweed flower. The authors compare von Mangoldt planes to metrics on Riemannian manifolds, in the spirit of Toponogov's comparison theorems, using von Mangoldt planes in place of constant curvature surfaces. They study the geodesics of surfaces of revolution in detail using the Clairaut integral of motion. They prove that the souls of any rotationally symmetric complete metric on \(\mathbb R^2\) of nonnegative curvature form a closed ball. If the metric is von Mangoldt, they compute the radius of the ball.