Great sphere foliations and manifolds with curvature bounded above

Abstract

The survey is devoted to Toponogov's conjecture, that {\it if a complete simply connected Riemannian manifold with sectional curvature $\le 4$ and injectivity radius $\ge \pi/2$ has extremal diameter $\pi/2$, then it is isometric to CROSS}. In Section 1 the relations of problem with geodesic foliations of a round sphere are considered, but the proof of conjecture on this way is not complete. In Section 2 the proof based on recent results and methods for topology and volume of Blaschke manifolds is given.