Narasihman and Ramanan proved in [Amer. J. Math. 83(1961), 563–572] that an arbitrary connection in a vector bundle over a base space B can be obtained as the pull-back (via a correctly chosen classifying map from B into the appropriate Grassmannian) of the universal connection in the universal bundle over the Grassmannian. The purpose of this paper is to relate geometric properties of the classifying map to geometric properties of the pulled-back connection. More specifically, we describe conditions on the classifying map under which the pulled-back connection: (1) is fat (in the sphere bundle), (2) has a parallel curvature tensor, and (3) induces a connection metric with nonnegative sectional curvature on the vector bundle (or positive sectional curvature on the sphere bundle).

A famous conjecture of Hopf states that $\mathbb{S}^{2}\times \mathbb{S}^{2}$ does not admit a Riemannian metric with positive sectional curvature. In this article, we prove that no manifold product $N\times N$ can carry a metric of positive sectional curvature admitting a certain degree of torus symmetry.

The squared distance curvature is a kind of two-point curvature the sign of which turned out to be crucial for the smoothness of optimal transportation maps on Riemannian manifolds. Positivity properties of that new curvature have been established recently for all the simply connected compact rank one symmetric spaces, except the Cayley plane. Direct proofs were given for the sphere, and an indirect one (via the Hopf fibrations) for the complex and quaternionic projective spaces. Here, we present a direct proof of a property implying all the preceding ones, valid on every positively curved Riemannian locally symmetric space.