Foliations And The Geometry Of 3 Manifolds

This unique reference, aimed at research topologists, gives an exposition of the 'pseudo-Anosov' theory of foliations of 3-manifolds. This theory generalizes Thurston's theory of surface automorphisms and reveals an intimate connection between dynamics, geometry and topology in 3 dimensions. Significant themes returned to throughout the text include the importance of geometry, especially the hyperbolic geometry of surfaces, the importance of monotonicity, especially in1-dimensional and co-dimensional dynamics, and combinatorial approximation, using finite combinatorical objects such as train-tracks, branched surfaces and hierarchies to carry more complicated continuous objects.

This volume contains surveys and research articles regarding different aspects of the theory of foliation. The main aspects concern the topology of foliations of low-dimensional manifolds, the geometry of foliated Riemannian manifolds and the dynamical properties of foliations. Among the surveys are lecture notes devoted to the analysis of some operator algebras on foliated manifolds and the theory of confoliations (objects defined recently by W Thurston and Y Eliashberg, situated between foliations and contact structures). Among the research articles one can find a detailed proof of an unpublished theorem (due to Duminy) concerning ends of leaves in exceptional minimal sets. Contents:Survey Articles:Some Results on Secondary Characteristic Classes of Transversely Holomorphic Foliations (T Asuke)LS-Categories for Foliated Manifolds (H Colman)Dynamics and the Godbillon–Vey Class: A History and Survey (S Hurder)Similarity and Conformal Geometry of Foliations (R Langevin)Foliations and Contact Structures on 3-Manifolds (Y Mitsumatsu)Operator Algebras and the Index Theorem on Foliated Manifolds (H Moriyoshi)Research Articles:Distributional Betti Numbers of Transitive Foliations of Codimension One (J Álvarez-López & Y Kordyukov)Tautly Foliated 3-Manifolds with No R-Covered Foliations (M Brittenham)Endests of Exceptional Leaves — A Theorem of G Duminy (J Cantwell & L Conlon)Foliations and Compactly Generated Pseudogroups (A Haefliger)Transverse Lusternik–Schnirelmann Category and Non-Proper Leaves (R Langevin & P Walczak)On Exact Poisson Manifolds of Dimension 3 (T Mizutani)On the Perfectness of Groups of Diffeomorphisms of the Interval Tangent to the Identity at the Endpoints (T Tsuboi)and other papers Readership: Researchers interested in mathematics, especially in fields related to differential geometry and topology, and the theory of dynamical systems. Keywords:Proceedings;Workshop;Geometry;Warsaw (Poland);Dynamics;Euroworkshop

This book presents the first steps of a theory of confoliations designed to link geometry and topology of three-dimensional contact structures with the geometry and topology of codimension-one foliations on three-dimensional manifolds. Developing almost independently, these theories at first glance belonged to two different worlds: The theory of foliations is part of topology and dynamical systems, while contact geometry is the odd-dimensional 'brother' of symplectic geometry. However, both theories have developed a number of striking similarities. Confoliations - which interpolate between contact structures and codimension-one foliations - should help us to understand better links between the two theories. These links provide tools for transporting results from one field to the other.It's features include: a unified approach to the topology of codimension-one foliations and contact geometry; insight on the geometric nature of integrability; and, new results, in particular on the perturbation of confoliations into contact structures.

This book is devoted to geometric problems of foliation theory, in particular those related to extrinsic geometry, modern branch of Riemannian Geometry. The concept of mixed curvature is central to the discussion, and a version of the deep problem of the Ricci curvature for the case of mixed curvature of foliations is examined. The book is divided into five chapters that deal with integral and variation formulas and curvature and dynamics of foliations. Different approaches and methods (local and global, regular and singular) in solving the problems are described using integral and variation formulas, extrinsic geometric flows, generalizations of the Ricci and scalar curvatures, pseudo-Riemannian and metric-affine geometries, and 'computable' Finsler metrics. The book presents the state of the art in geometric and analytical theory of foliations as a continuation of the authors' life-long work in extrinsic geometry. It is designed for newcomers to the field as well as experienced geometers working in Riemannian geometry, foliation theory, differential topology, and a wide range of researchers in differential equations and their applications. It may also be a useful supplement to postgraduate level work and can inspire new interesting topics to explore.

This book covers recent topics in various aspects of foliation theory and its relation with other areas including dynamical systems, C∗-algebras, index theory and low-dimensional topology. It contains survey articles by G Hector, S Hurder and P Molino, as well as more than 20 original papers by specialists who are currently most active in the field.

Offers basic material on distributions and foliations. This book introduces and builds the tools needed for studying the geometry of foliated manifolds. Its main theme is to investigate the interrelations between foliations of a manifold on the one hand, and the many geometric structures that the manifold may admit on the other hand.

Intuitively, a foliation corresponds to a decomposition of a manifold into a union of connected, disjoint submanifolds of the same dimension, called leaves, which pile up locally like pages of a book. The theory of foliations, as it is known, began with the work of C. Ehresmann and G. Reeb, in the 1940's; however, as Reeb has himself observed, already in the last century P. Painleve saw the necessity of creating a geometric theory (of foliations) in order to better understand the problems in the study of solutions of holomorphic differential equations in the complex field. The development of the theory of foliations was however provoked by the following question about the topology of manifolds proposed by H. Hopf in the 3 1930's: "Does there exist on the Euclidean sphere S a completely integrable vector field, that is, a field X such that X· curl X • 0?" By Frobenius' theorem, this question is equivalent to the following: "Does there exist on the 3 sphere S a two-dimensional foliation?" This question was answered affirmatively by Reeb in his thesis, where he 3 presents an example of a foliation of S with the following characteristics: There exists one compact leaf homeomorphic to the two-dimensional torus, while the other leaves are homeomorphic to two-dimensional planes which accu mulate asymptotically on the compact leaf. Further, the foliation is C"".

The topics in this survey volume concern research done on the differential geom etry of foliations over the last few years. After a discussion of the basic concepts in the theory of foliations in the first four chapters, the subject is narrowed down to Riemannian foliations on closed manifolds beginning with Chapter 5. Following the discussion of the special case of flows in Chapter 6, Chapters 7 and 8 are de voted to Hodge theory for the transversal Laplacian and applications of the heat equation method to Riemannian foliations. Chapter 9 on Lie foliations is a prepa ration for the statement of Molino's Structure Theorem for Riemannian foliations in Chapter 10. Some aspects of the spectral theory for Riemannian foliations are discussed in Chapter 11. Connes' point of view of foliations as examples of non commutative spaces is briefly described in Chapter 12. Chapter 13 applies ideas of Riemannian foliation theory to an infinite-dimensional context. Aside from the list of references on Riemannian foliations (items on this list are referred to in the text by [ ]), we have included several appendices as follows. Appendix A is a list of books and surveys on particular aspects of foliations. Appendix B is a list of proceedings of conferences and symposia devoted partially or entirely to foliations. Appendix C is a bibliography on foliations, which attempts to be a reasonably complete list of papers and preprints on the subject of foliations up to 1995, and contains approximately 2500 titles.