Geometry at Infinity

Priority programme of the DFG

Welcome to SPP 2026

This is the platform of a coordinated research programme in mathematics, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG).  It comprises 80 research projects in the fields of differential geometry, geometric topology, and global analysis. More than 80 researchers from doctoral to professorial level and based at more than 20 German and Swiss universities are represented in this programme. 

Latest Blog posts

Lie groups acting on countable sets Does every connected Lie group act faithfully on a countable set? In other words: is every Lie group a subgroup of \(\mathrm{Sym}(\mathbb{N})\)? This question is sometimes called Ulam’s problem and there is recent progress in a paper of Nicolas Monod. Monod proves that every nilpotent connected Lie group acts faithfully on a countable set. It … Continue reading "Lie groups acting on countable sets"
Topological CAT(0)-manifolds It is an interesting and important fact that a contractible manifold (without boundary) is not necessarily homeomorphic to Euclidean space. This makes the classical Cartan-Hadamard theorem, stating that a contractible manifold equipped with a Riemannian metric of non-positive sectional curvature is diffeomorphic to Euclidean space, even more powerful. One can ask now whether one can … Continue reading "Topological CAT(0)-manifolds"
PSC obstructions via infinite width and index theory In a recent preprint (arXiv:2108.08506), Yosuke Kubota proved an intriguing new result on the relation of largeness properties of spin manifolds and index-theoretic obstructions to positive scalar curvature (psc): Let \(M\) be a closed spin \(n\)-manifold. If \(M\) has infinite \(\mathcal{KO}\)-width, then its Rosenberg index \(\alpha(M) \in \mathrm{KO}_n(\mathrm{C}^\ast_{\max} \pi_1 M)\) does not vanish. Let us … Continue reading "PSC obstructions via infinite width and index theory"
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