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.

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.

Robert J. Zimmer is best known in mathematics for the highly influential conjectures and program that bear his name. Group Actions in Ergodic Theory, Geometry, and Topology: Selected Papers brings together some of the most significant writings by Zimmer, which lay out his program and contextualize his work over the course of his career. Zimmer’s body of work is remarkable in that it involves methods from a variety of mathematical disciplines, such as Lie theory, differential geometry, ergodic theory and dynamical systems, arithmetic groups, and topology, and at the same time offers a unifying perspective. After arriving at the University of Chicago in 1977, Zimmer extended his earlier research on ergodic group actions to prove his cocycle superrigidity theorem which proved to be a pivotal point in articulating and developing his program. Zimmer’s ideas opened the door to many others, and they continue to be actively employed in many domains related to group actions in ergodic theory, geometry, and topology. In addition to the selected papers themselves, this volume opens with a foreword by David Fisher, Alexander Lubotzky, and Gregory Margulis, as well as a substantial introductory essay by Zimmer recounting the course of his career in mathematics. The volume closes with an afterword by Fisher on the most recent developments around the Zimmer program.

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.

This volume takes a look at the current state of the theory of foliations, with surveys and research articles concerning different aspects. The focused aspects cover geometry of foliated Riemannian manifolds, Riemannian foliations and dynamical properties of foliations and some aspects of classical dynamics related to the field. Among the articles readers may find a study of foliations which admit a transverse contractive flow, an extensive survey on non-commutative geometry of Riemannian foliations, an article on contact structures converging to foliations, as well as a few articles on conformal geometry of foliations. This volume also contains a list of open problems in foliation theory which were collected from the participants of the Foliations 2005 conference.

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.