Geometric and spectral consequences of curvature bounds on tessellations

This is a chapter of a forthcoming Lecture Notes in Mathematics "Modern Approaches to Discrete Curvature" edited by L. Najman and P. Romon. It provides a survey on geometric and spectral consequences of curvature bounds. The geometric setting are tessellations of surfaces with finite and vanishing genus. We consider a curvature arising as an angular defect. Several of the results presented here have analogues in Riemannian geometry. In some cases one can go even beyond the Riemannian results and there also striking differences which shall be highlighted.