  We study a natural intrinsic definition of geometric simplices in Riemannian
manifolds of arbitrary dimension $n$, and exploit these simplices to obtain
criteria for triangulating compact Riemannian manifolds. These geometric
simplices are defined using Karcher means. Given a finite set of vertices in a
convex set on the manifold, the point that minimises the weighted sum of
squared distances to the vertices is the Karcher mean relative to the weights.
Using barycentric coordinates as the weights, we obtain a smooth map from the
standard Euclidean simplex to the manifold. A Riemannian simplex is defined as
the image of this barycentric coordinate map. In this work we articulate
criteria that guarantee that the barycentric coordinate map is a smooth
embedding. If it is not, we say the Riemannian simplex is degenerate. Quality
measures for the "thickness" or "fatness" of Euclidean simplices can be adapted
to apply to these Riemannian simplices. For manifolds of dimension 2, the
simplex is non-degenerate if it has a positive quality measure, as in the
Euclidean case. However, when the dimension is greater than two, non-degeneracy
can be guaranteed only when the quality exceeds a positive bound that depends
on the size of the simplex and local bounds on the absolute values of the
sectional curvatures of the manifold. An analysis of the geometry of
non-degenerate Riemannian simplices leads to conditions which guarantee that a
simplicial complex is homeomorphic to the manifold.
