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.

The text presents the birational classification of holomorphic foliations of surfaces. It discusses at length the theory developed by L.G. Mendes, M. McQuillan and the author to study foliations of surfaces in the spirit of the classification of complex algebraic surfaces.

Foliation theory has its origins in the global analysis of solutions of ordinary differential equations: on an n-dimensional manifold M, an [autonomous] differential equation is defined by a vector field X ; if this vector field has no singularities, then its trajectories form a par tition of M into curves, i.e. a foliation of codimension n - 1. More generally, a foliation F of codimension q on M corresponds to a partition of M into immersed submanifolds [the leaves] of dimension ,--------,- - . - -- p = n - q. The first global image that comes to mind is 1--------;- - - - - - that of a stack of "plaques". 1---------;- - - - - - Viewed laterally [transver 1--------1- - - -- sally], the leaves of such a 1--------1 - - - - -. stacking are the points of a 1--------1--- ----. quotient manifold W of di L..... -' _ mension q. -----~) W M Actually, this image corresponds to an elementary type of folia tion, that one says is "simple". For an arbitrary foliation, it is only l- u L ally [on a "simpIe" open set U] that the foliation appears as a stack of plaques and admits a local quotient manifold. Globally, a leaf L may - - return and cut a simple open set U in several plaques, sometimes even an infinite number of plaques.

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"".

Surveys research over the past few years at a level accessible to graduate students and researchers with a background in differential and Riemannian geometry. Among the topics are foliations of codimension one, holonomy, Lie foliations, basic forms, mean curvature, the Hodge theory for the transversal Laplacian, applications of the heat equation method to Riemannian foliations, the spectral theory, Connes' perspective of foliations as examples of non- commutative spaces, and infinite-dimensional examples. The bibliographic appendices list books and surveys on particular aspects of foliations, proceedings of conferences and symposia, all papers on the subject up to 1995, and the numbers of papers published on the subject during the years 1990-95. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

This book is an introduction to several active research topics in Foliation Theory and its connections with other areas. It contains expository lectures showing the diversity of ideas and methods converging in the study of foliations. The lectures by Aziz El Kacimi Alaoui provide an introduction to Foliation Theory with emphasis on examples and transverse structures. Steven Hurder's lectures apply ideas from smooth dynamical systems to develop useful concepts in the study of foliations: limit sets and cycles for leaves, leafwise geodesic flow, transverse exponents, Pesin Theory and hyperbolic, parabolic and elliptic types of foliations. The lectures by Masayuki Asaoka compute the leafwise cohomology of foliations given by actions of Lie groups, and apply it to describe deformation of those actions. In his lectures, Ken Richardson studies the properties of transverse Dirac operators for Riemannian foliations and compact Lie group actions, and explains a recently proved index formula. Besides students and researchers of Foliation Theory, this book will be interesting for mathematicians interested in the applications to foliations of subjects like Topology of Manifolds, Differential Geometry, Dynamics, Cohomology or Global Analysis.

Presents the proceedings of the conference on Foliations, Geometry, and Topology, held August 6-10, 2007, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in honor of the 70th birthday of Paul Schweitzer. The papers focus on the theory of foliations and related areas such as dynamical systems, group actions on low dimensional manifolds, and geometry of hypersurfaces.