Pinching on open manifolds

Abstract

We show that the 2-jet bundle of local Riemannian metrics on an arbitrary differentiable manifold admits a section which pointwise fulfills the curvature relation sec(g)=a for any real number a. It follows by Gromov's h-principle for open, invariant differential relations that every noncompact differentiable manifold carries arbitrarily pinched (incomplete) Riemannian metrics.