Maung Min-Oo - Mass, scalar curvature and K-area

This talk will give a short selected survey of some old and new results about scalar curvature rigidity of Riemannian manifolds. Many of the ideas have their origins in Witten's spinorial proof of the positive mass conjecture and in the classical work by Gromov and Lawson on obstruction to positive scalar curvature metrics. Some of the newer results are concerned with good estimates of an invariant called the K-area, which was introduced by Gromov in 1994. We will give ``sharp'' inequalities for the K-area of Hermitian symmetric spaces in terms of the scalar curvature.