Use the sign convention
For the Levi-Civita connection this is the Riemannian curvature two-form, an element of : is an endomorphism of the tangent bundle, alternating in , and the expression has tensoriality in all arguments. It is the curvature form of a connection for the tangent-bundle connection.
For the first Bianchi identity, take the cyclic sum in . Torsion-freeness says , so the double-derivative terms combine to . The remaining terms may be cyclically relabelled as . Using torsion-freeness once more, followed by the Jacobi identity for vector fields, gives
The Ricci curvature is the trace
for any orthonormal basis. The sectional curvature of the two-plane spanned by independent is
These conventions give positive curvature on a round sphere. In dimension three, put and . Curvature symmetries give
Solving this linear system yields the sectional curvatures from Ricci curvature in dimension three formula
Here is the scalar curvature. The chosen orthonormal basis need not diagonalize Ricci; its diagonal evaluations already determine these three sectional curvatures.