The articles in this volume are an outgrowth of a colloquium "Systemes Integrables et Feuilletages," which was held in honor of the sixtieth birthday of Pierre Molino. The topics cover the broad range of mathematical areas which were of keen interest to Molino, namely, integral systems and more generally symplectic geometry and Poisson structures, foliations and Lie transverse structures, transitive structures, and classification problems.
Integrable Hamiltonian systems have been of growing interest over the past 30 years and represent one of the most intriguing and mysterious classes of dynamical systems. This book explores the topology of integrable systems and the general theory underlying their qualitative properties, singularites, and topological invariants. The authors,
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.
A first approximation to the idea of a foliation is a dynamical system, and the resulting decomposition of a domain by its trajectories. This is an idea that dates back to the beginning of the theory of differential equations, i.e. the seventeenth century. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, Poincare developed methods for the study of global, qualitative properties of solutions of dynamical systems in situations where explicit solution methods had failed: He discovered that the study of the geometry of the space of trajectories of a dynamical system reveals complex phenomena. He emphasized the qualitative nature of these phenomena, thereby giving strong impetus to topological methods. A second approximation is the idea of a foliation as a decomposition of a manifold into submanifolds, all being of the same dimension. Here the presence of singular submanifolds, corresponding to the singularities in the case of a dynamical system, is excluded. This is the case we treat in this text, but it is by no means a comprehensive analysis. On the contrary, many situations in mathematical physics most definitely require singular foliations for a proper modeling. The global study of foliations in the spirit of Poincare was begun only in the 1940's, by Ehresmann and Reeb.
The papers, some of which are in English, the rest in French, in this volume are based on lectures given during the meeting of the Seminare Sud Rhodanien de Geometrie (SSRG) organized at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in 1989. The SSRG was established in 1982 by geometers and mathematical physicists with the aim of developing and coordinating research in symplectic geometry and its applications to analysis and mathematical physics. Among the subjects discussed at the meeting, a special role was given to the theory of symplectic groupoids, the subject of fruitful collaboration involving geometers from Berkeley, Lyon, and Montpellier.
Some of the most active practitioners in the field of integrable systems have been asked to describe what they think of as the problems and results which seem to be most interesting and important now and are likely to influence future directions. The papers in this collection, representing their authors' responses, offer a broad panorama of the subject as it enters the 1990's.
Articles in this collection are devoted to modern problems of topology, geometry, mathematical physics, and integrable systems, and they are based on talks given at the famous Novikov's seminar at the Steklov Institute of Mathematics in Moscow in 2012-2014. The articles cover many aspects of seemingly unrelated areas of modern mathematics and mathematical physics; they reflect the main scientific interests of the organizer of the seminar, Sergey Petrovich Novikov. The volume is suitable for graduate students and researchers interested in the corresponding areas of mathematics and physics.
The Geometric Theory of Foliations is one of the fields in Mathematics that gathers several distinct domains: Topology, Dynamical Systems, Differential Topology and Geometry, among others. Its great development has allowed a better comprehension of several phenomena of mathematical and physical nature. Our book contains material dating from the origins of the theory of foliations, from the original works of C Ehresmann and G Reeb, up till modern developments.In a suitable choice of topics we are able to cover material in a coherent way bringing the reader to the heart of recent results in the field. A number of theorems, nowadays considered to be classical, like the Reeb Stability Theorem, Haefliger's Theorem, and Novikov Compact leaf Theorem, are proved in the text. The stability theorem of Thurston and the compact leaf theorem of Plante are also thoroughly proved. Nevertheless, these notes are introductory and cover only a minor part of the basic aspects of the rich theory of foliations.
