show/hide this revision's text 5 Added comment about attempts to prove result

ADDITIONAL COMMENT: My approach to this was to construct a differentiable family of geodesic rays emanating from the singularity. Once I have this, then it is straightforward using Jacobi fields to show that this family must be naturally isomorphic to the standard unit sphere. Then using what Jost and Karcher call "almost linear coordinates", it is easy to construct a C^1 co-ordinate chart on a neighborhood of the singularity. (Read the paper. Nothing in it is hard.)

But I was unable to build this family of geodesics without the "no small geodesic loop" assumption. To me this is an overly strong assumption that is essentially equivalent to assuming in advance that that differentiable family of geodesics exists. So I find our result to be totally unsatisfying. I don't see why this assumption should be necessary, and I still believe there should be an easy way to show this. Or there should be a counterexample.

I have to say, however, that I am pretty sure that I did consult one or two pretty distinguished Riemannian geometers and they were not able to provide any useful insight into this.
show/hide this revision's text 4 edited tags
show/hide this revision's text 3 Add more explicit assumption to avoid orbifold singularity

Suppose you have an incomplete Riemannian manifold with bounded sectional curvature such that its completion as a metric space is the manifold plus one additional point. Does the Riemannian manifold structure extend across the point singularity?

(Penny Smith and I wrote a paper on this many years ago, but we had to assume that no arbitrarily short closed geodesics existed in a neighborhood of the singularity. I was never able to figure out how to get rid of this assumption and still would like someone better at Riemannian geometry than me to explain how. Or show me a counterexample.)

EDIT: For simplicity, assume that the dimension of the manifold is greater than 2 and that in any neighborhood of the singularity, there exists a smaller punctured neighborhood of the singularity that is simply connected. In dimension 2, you have to replace this assumption by an appropriate holonomy condition.

EDIT 2: Let's make the assumption above simpler and clearer. Assume dimension greater than 2 and that for any r > 0, there exists 0 < r' < r, such that the punctured geodesic ball B(p,r'){p} is simply connected, where p is the singular point. The precludes the possibility of an orbifold singularity.
show/hide this revision's text 2 Add missing assumption about local simply connectedness
show/hide this revision's text 1