Umbilical foliations and transversely holomorphic flows (Q1891984)

A transversely oriented codimension one foliation \(F\) of a closed oriented 3-manifold \(M\) is umbilical with respect to some Riemannian metric on \(M\) (i.e. every leaf of \(F\) is an umbilic hypersurface) if and only if \(F\) is transverse to an oriented 1-dimensional foliation \(N\) which is transversely holomorphic (i.e. locally defined by submersions into the complex plane which differ by a holomorphic map). This easy observation is the starting point for the classification the authors give of transversely oriented codimension one umbilical foliations of closed oriented 3-manifolds. A corollary of their classification is that a closed orientable 3-manifold which admits an umbilical foliation is, up to diffeomorphism, the total space either of a Seifert fibration or of a torus bundle over the circle.