The first of two volumes on the qualitative theory of foliations, this comprehensive work has something to offer to a broad spectrum of readers, from beginners to advanced students and professional researchers. Packed with a wealth of illustrations and copious examples at varying degrees of difficulty, this highly-accessible text provides the first full treatment in the literature of the theory of levels for foliated manifolds of codimension one. It would make an elegant supplementary text for a topics course at the advanced graduate level.

This is the second of two volumes on foliations (the first is Volume 23 of this series). In this volume, three specialized topics are treated: analysis on foliated spaces, characteristic classes of foliations, and foliated three-manifolds. Each of these topics represents deep interaction between foliation theory and another highly developed area of mathematics. In each case, the goal is to provide students and other interested people with a substantial introduction to the topic leading to further study using the extensive available literature.

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.

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"".

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. Sample Chapter(s). Chapter 1: Morphisms of Pseudogroups and foliated Maps (808 KB). Contents: Morphisms of Pseudogroups and Foliated Maps (J ulvarez Lpez & X Masa); On Infinitesimal Derivatives of the Bott Class (T Asuke); Hirsch Foliations in Codimension Greater Than One (A Bis, S Hurder & J Shive); Extrinsic Geometry of Foliations on 3-Manifolds (D Bolotov); Extrinsic Geometry of Foliations (M Czarnecki & P Walczak); Transversal Twistor Spinors on a Riemannian Foliation (S D Jung); A Survey on Simplicial Volume and Invariants of Foliations and Laminations (T Kuessner); Harmonic Foliations of the Plane, a Conformal Approach (R Langevin); Consecutive Shifts Along Orbits of Vector Fields (S Maksymenko); Generalized Equivariant Index Theory (K Richardson); Vanishing Results for Spectral Terms of a Riemannian Foliation (V Slesar); On the Group of Foliation Preserving Diffeomorphisms (T Tsuboi); and other papers. Readership: Researchers and graduate students in such areas of mathematics as foliations, dynamical systems (Anosov and Morse-Smale, in particular), Riemannian and conformal geometry; and in other fields such as mathematical physics, non-commutative geometry and analysis on manifolds."

This book gives a quick introduction to the theory of foliations and Lie groupoids. It is based on the authors' extensive teaching experience and contains numerous examples and exercises making it ideal either for independent study or as the basis of a graduate course.

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.