This book presents a comprehensive, encyclopedic approach to the subject of foliations, one of the major concepts of modern geometry and topology. It addresses graduate students and researchers and serves as a reference book for experts in the field.

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.

Aimed at researchers, graduate students and undergraduates alike, this book presents a unified exposition of all the main areas and methods of the theory of Kleinian groups and the theory of uniformization of manifolds. The past 20 years have seen a rejuvenation of the field, due to the development of powerful new methods in topology, the theory of functions of several complex variables, and the theory of quasiconformal mappings. Thus this new book should provide a valuable resource, listing the basic facts regarding Kleinian groups and serving as a general guide to the primary literature, particularly the Russian literature in the field. In addition, the book includes a large number of examples, problems, and unsolved problems, many of them presented for the first time.

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.

This volume contains the proceedings of the Workshop on Topology held at the Pontificia Universidade Catolica in Rio de Janeiro in January 1992. Bringing together about one hundred mathematicians from Brazil and around the world, the workshop covered a variety of topics in differential and algebraic topology, including group actions, foliations, low-dimensional topology, and connections to differential geometry. The main concentration was on foliation theory, but there was a lively exchange on other current topics in topology. The volume contains an excellent list of open problems in foliation research, prepared with the participation of some of the top world experts in this area. Also presented here are two surveys on group actions---finite group actions and rigidity theory for Anosov actions---as well as an elementary survey of Thurston's geometric topology in dimensions 2 and 3 that would be accessible to advanced undergraduates and graduate students.