Let M be a complete two-dimensional surface immersed into the three-dimensional Euclidean space. Then a classical theorem of Hilbert says that when the curvature of M is a non-zero constant, M must be the sphere. On the other hand, when the curvature of M is zero, a theorem of Hartman-Nirenberg [4] says that M must be a plane or a cylinder. These two theorems complete the classification of complete surfaces with constant curvature in R 3.

Let M be a compact Criemannian manifold of nonpositive curvature1 and with fundamental group . It is well known [8, p. 102] that M is a K (, 1) and thus completely determined up to homotopy type by . In light of this fact it is natural to ask to what extent the riemannian structure of M is determined by the structure of , and the intent of this paper is to demonstrate that rather strong implications of this sort exist. In the case that M has strictly negative curvature, the group is known to be highly noncommutative. Every abelian, in fact, every solvable, subgroup of is cyclic [3]. It is therefore a plausible conjecture that in the nonpositive curvature case, will possess large amounts of commutativity only under special geometric circumstances. We shall show that this is true, that indeed those properties of which involve commutativity have a dramatic reflection in the riemannian structure of M.

We briefly survey our recent results about the Mumford goodness of several canonical metrics on the moduli spaces of Riemann surfaces, including the Weil-Petersson metric, the Ricci metric, the Perturbed Ricci metric and the Kahler-Einstein metric. We prove the dual Nakano negativity of the Weil-Petersson metric. As applications of these results we deduce certain important results about the <i>L</i> ²-cohomology groups of the logarithmic tangent bundle over the compactified moduli spaces.

In this short note, using Siu-Yau's method [14], we give a new proof that any n-dimensional compact K ahler manifold with positive orthogonal bisectional curvature must be biholomorphic to \mathbb {P}^ n .

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