Geometry of foliations (Q4337693)

This book is devoted to several aspects of the geometry of Riemannian foliated manifolds. The first three chapters as well as Chapters 10 and 12 contain a brief exposition of the theory of foliations (definitions, examples, holonomy, structure of Riemannian foliations, Connes' noncommutative view of foliations, etc.) and their Riemannian geometry (second fundamental form, mean curvature, etc.). Chapter 4 is devoted to basic forms and basic cohomology, properties of the characteristic form of a foliation and some properties of harmonic foliations. In Chapter 5, the transverse geometry (curvature tensor, fundamental tensors, etc.) of Riemannian foliations is studied in detail. Chapter 6 brings some applications of the results of previous chapters to non-singular flows, i.e., oriented 1-dimensional foliations. In Chapter 7, the Hodge theory for the transverse Laplacian and duality theorems for basic forms in the case of a Riemannian foliation are discussed. A kind of Bochner vanishing theorem for the basic cohomology of a Riemannian foliation is proved in Chapter 8. The main result of Chapter 9 provides some geometrical conditions under which a Riemannian foliation becomes a Lie foliation. In Chapter 11, the spectral geometry of Riemannian foliations is developed. Among other results, a list of isospectral invariants (including dimensions, volumes, total scalar curvatures, and so on) is produced. Finally, the last chapter contains a brief description of some results for infinite-dimensional Riemannian foliations which can arise, for example, from the action of a gauge group. The book contains a large list of references on Riemannian foliations, a list of books and surveys on particular aspects of foliations (Appendix A), a list of several conferences and symposia devoted to foliations (Appendix B), the most complete (as far as I know) bibliography on foliations (Appendix C, more than 2400 items!) and an intriguing statistics of interest in the theory of foliations during the last century (Appendix D).