Three viewpoints on the integral geometry of foliations (Q1300127)

The paper under review is devoted to the integral geometry of foliations (and submanifolds) of codimension greater than \(1\). The paper has three parts. In the first part, the authors consider a foliation \({\mathcal F}^{n} \), \(n\geq 2\), with a bounded second fundamental form in a bounded domain \( U\) of a Euclidean space \(\mathbb{R}^{n+p}\), \(p\geq 1\). Let \({\mathcal A}(p+1,n+p)\) be the manifold of all affine \((p+1)\)-dimensional subspaces \(\pi \subset\mathbb{R}^{n+p}\) with its standard measure \(d\pi\). The main result is an asymptotic formula (when \(M\to\infty\)) for the (divergent) integrals \[ F_m(M) = \int_{{\mathcal A}(p+1,n+p)}{\left(\int_{\pi\cap(k\leq M)}{k^{m}(\pi\cap{\mathcal F})d{\mathcal L}}\right)d\pi}, \] where \(k^{m}\), \(m\geq 0\), is a fixed power of the curvature \(k\) of curves (with singularities) of the induced foliation \(\pi \cap {\mathcal F}^{n}\), \(d{\mathcal L}\) is the \((p+1)\)-dimensional Lebesgue measure in \(\pi \cap U\). In the second part, the paper deals with surfaces of contact of a foliation \({\mathcal F}^{n} \subset U \subset\mathbb{R}^{n+p}\), \(n,p\geq 1\), with the affine hyperplanes \(\pi\subset\mathbb{R}^{n+p}\). The set of contact is a \((p-1)\)-dimensional submanifold \(S_{\pi}\) in \(\pi\) (in general with singularities). The authors prove that the integral of the total absolute curvature of the foliation can be expressed in terms of the integrals over \(S_{\pi}\) of certain functions of the principal angles between the normal subspace to the surface and the tangent space to the leaves. Finally, the third part of the paper is devoted to the conformal integral geometry of a \(2\)-dimensional foliation in a \(3\)-dimensional conformal space of constant curvature. A noteworthy result is that the \(3\)-form \(|k_1 - k_2 |^{3}dV\) is a conformal invariant (\(k_1,k_2\) are the principal curvatures of the leaves and \(dV\) is the volume element).