Ricci-positive metrics on connected sums of projective spaces

It is a well known result of Gromov that all manifolds of a given dimension with positive sectional curvature are subject to a universal bound on the sum of their Betti numbers. On the other hand, there is no such bound for manifolds with positive Ricci curvature: indeed, Perelman constructed Ricci positive metrics on arbitrary connected sums of complex projective planes. In this paper, we revisit and extend Perelman's techniques to construct Ricci positive metrics on arbitrary connected sums of complex, quaternionic, and octonionic projective spaces in every dimension.