Lectures on Spaces of Nonpositive Curvature

I. On the interior geometry of metric spaces.- 1. Preliminaries.- 2. The Hopf-Rinow Theorem.- 3. Spaces with curvature bounded from above.- 4. The Hadamard-Cartan Theorem.- 5. Hadamard spaces.- II. The boundary at infinity.- 1. Closure of X via Busemann functions.- 2. Closure of X via rays.- 3. Classification of isometries.- 4. The cone at infinity and the Tits metric.- III. Weak hyperbolicity.- 1. The duality condition.- 2. Geodesic flows on Hadamard spaces.- 3. The flat half plane condition.- 4. Harmonic functions and random walks on ?.- IV. Rank rigidity.- 1. Preliminaries on geodesic flows.- 2. Jacobi fields and curvature.- 3. Busemann functions and horospheres.- 4. Rank, regular vectors and flats.- 5. An invariant set at infinity.- 6. Proof of the rank rigidity.- Appendix. Ergodicity of geodesic flows.- 1. Introductory remarks.- Measure and ergodic theory preliminaries.- Absolutely continuous foliations.- Anosov flows and the Ho continuity of invariant distributions.- Proof of absolute continuity and ergodicity.

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