MathOverflow will be down for maintenance for approximately 3 hours, starting Monday evening (06/24/2013) at approximately 9:00 PM Eastern time (UTC-4).

2 added 96 characters in body

This is clearly false, just consider the cylinder

$$R_t \times S_{\theta}$$

with the product metric

$$g_\alpha=dt^2+\alpha^2 d\theta^2.$$

This is a flat metric so $Ric_{g_\alpha} = 0$. On the other hand, for $r>>\alpha$, it is easy to see $Area(\partial B_r)<8\pi \alpha$. Since $\alpha$ is arbitrary there is no uniform lower bound.

Maybe you need a uniform lower bound on the injectivity radius? (I'm not an expert on comparison geometry so don't know off the top of my head if this would suffice) [Edit: Or maybe this can only happen if the metric splits off an isometric euclidean factor].

[As an aside I can't seem to get math blackboard fonts to work anyone else have a problem with this?]

1

This is clearly false, just consider the cylinder

$$R_t \times S_{\theta}$$

with the product metric

$$g_\alpha=dt^2+\alpha^2 d\theta^2.$$

This is a flat metric so $Ric_{g_\alpha} = 0$. On the other hand, for $r>>\alpha$, it is easy to see $Area(\partial B_r)<8\pi \alpha$. Since $\alpha$ is arbitrary there is no uniform lower bound.

Maybe you need a uniform lower bound on the injectivity radius? (I'm not an expert on comparison geometry so don't know off the top of my head if this would suffice)

[As an aside I can't seem to get math blackboard fonts to work anyone else have a problem with this?]