Conley pairs in geometry -- Lusternik-Schnirelmann theory and more (Q2003390)

The paper under review is an expository article investigating Conley pairs and their applications. While Conley theory can be used to study the gradient flow in general, the paper looks at the special case where the critical points are only either non-degenerate or isolated. This leads to the study of Morse theory and Lusternik-Schnirelmann category, respectively. A relationship between these two topics is proved in the celebrated Lusternik-Schnirelmann theorem, which says that if \(f\) is a \(C^2\) function on a closed manifold, then the number of critical points of \(f\) bounds from above the (non-reduced) Lusternik-Schnirelmann category. Other tools for detecting critical points, such as cup-length, are studied in this paper.