Informally, the conjecture states that negative curvature allows regions with a given perimeter to hold more
volume. This phenomenon manifests itself in nature through corrugations on coral reefs, or ripples on a petunia flower, which form some of the simplest examples of non-positively curved spaces.
According to Marcel Berger,[10] Weil, who was a student of Hadamard at the time, was prompted to work on this problem due to "a question asked during or after a Hadamard seminar at the Collège de France" by the probability theorist Paul Lévy.
The conjecture has a more general form, sometimes called the "generalized Cartan–Hadamard conjecture"[12] which states that if the curvature of the ambient Cartan–Hadamard manifold M is bounded above by a nonpositive constant k, then the least perimeter enclosures in M, for any given volume, cannot have smaller perimeter than a sphere enclosing the same volume
in the model space of constant curvature k.
The generalized conjecture has been established only in dimension 2 by Gerrit Bol,[13] and dimension 3 by Kleiner.[14] The generalized conjecture also holds for regions of small volume in all dimensions, as proved by Frank Morgan and David Johnson.[15]
^Weil, M. André; Hadamard, M. (1979), "Sur les surfaces à courbure négative", Œuvres Scientifiques Collected Papers, Springer New York, pp. 1–2, doi:10.1007/978-1-4757-1705-1_1, ISBN9781475717068