In the early 1950s Rauch made fundamental progress on the quarter-pinched sphere conjecture in differential geometry.[2] In the case of positive sectional curvature and simply connected differential manifolds, Rauch proved that, under the condition that the sectional curvature K does not deviate too much from K = 1, the manifold must be homeomorphic to the sphere (i.e. the case where there is constant sectional curvature K = 1). Rauch's result created a new paradigm in differential geometry, that of a "pinching theorem;" in Rauch's case, the assumption was that the curvature
was pinched between 0.76 and 1. This was later relaxed to pinching between 0.55 and 1 by Wilhelm Klingenberg, and finally replaced with the sharp result of pinching between 0.25 and 1
by Marcel Berger and Klingenberg in the early 1960s. This optimal result is known as the sphere theorem for Riemannian manifolds.
with H. M. Farkas: Farkas, Hershel M.; Rauch, Harry E. (1970). "Period relations of Schottky type on Riemann surfaces". Annals of Mathematics. 92 (2): 434–461. doi:10.2307/1970627. JSTOR1970627. MR0283193.
with Hershel M. Farkas: Theta functions with applications to Riemann Surfaces, Williams and Wilkins, Baltimore 1974
with Aaron Lebowitz: Elliptic functions, theta functions and Riemann Surfaces, Williams and Wilkins, 1973
with Matthew Graber, William Zlot: Elementary Geometry, Krieger 1973, 2nd edn. 1979
Geodesics and Curvature in Differential Geometry in the Large, Yeshiva University 1959
Sources
Hershel M. Farkas, Isaac Chavel (eds.): Differential geometry and complex analysis: a volume dedicated to the memory of Harry Ernest Rauch, Springer, 1985