Department of Mathematics, University of Iowa, Iowa City, Iowa 52242
Abstract:
Some properties of fundamental groups of Riemannian manifolds will be studied without a lower bound assumption on Ricci curvature. The main method is to relate the local packing to global packing instead of using the Bishop-Gromov relative volume comparison. This method allows us to control the volume growth of the universal cover and yields bounds on the number of generators of in terms of some isoembolic geometric invariants of .