Foliations on Riemannian manifolds and submanifolds (Q4353358)

In the last decades, foliations have played an important role not only in Topology and Analysis, but also in Riemannian geometry. A number of works on totally geodesic and Riemannian foliations [see \textit{Ph. Tondeur}, ``Geometry of foliations''. (Monographs in Mathematics. 90, Birkhäuser) (1997; Zbl 0905.53002) for references] motivated the interest of geometers towards the problem of the existence of compatible foliations and metrics on a given manifold with additional curvature restrictions. The book under review presents the author's work on this subject, including new and interesting techniques and results. The book also contains detailed surveys on such topics as: Riemannian geometry of foliations, variational theory of geodesics, foliations on space forms, ergodic theory, and ruled submanifolds in space forms. There are three types of sectional curvature for a foliation: tangential, transversal and mixed (\(K_{\text{mix}}\)). The first part of the book is devoted to the problem of obtaining an estimate for the dimension of a foliation on a (compact) Riemannian manifold with nonnegative \(K_{\text{mix}}\). The author firstly obtains rigidity and splitting theorems based on the idea that when the dimension of the foliation is ``large'' and \(K_{\text{mix}}\) is nonnegative, then the ambient manifold decomposes (locally) as a metric product with the leaves as one of the factors. As a consequence, he generalizes \textit{D. Ferus}' estimate [Math. Ann. 188, 313-316 (1970; Zbl 0194.52804)] for totally geodesic foliations with constant positive \(K_{\text{mix}}\). In the second part of the book, the investigation continues in the case of foliated submanifolds (e.g., ruled submanifolds, that is, submanifolds equipped with the additional structure of a foliation whose leaves are totally geodesic in the ambient Riemannian space). A central result is that a ruled submanifold in a sphere or in a complex projective space with a ruling of large dimension and a small norm of its second fundamental form is congruent to the Segre embedding. Analogously, the test of Segre type decomposition is obtained for a more general class of parabolic submanifolds [\textit{A. A. Borisenko}, Ukr. Geom. Sb. 12, 36-45 (1972; Zbl 0288.53044)] in a Riemannian space of positive curvature. There is an Appendix (written jointly with V. Toponogov) devoted to prove the following result: if a complete simply connected Riemannian manifold with sectional curvature \(\leq 4\) and injectivity radius \(\geq \pi/2\) has extremal diameter \(\pi/2\), then it is isometric to a compact rank one symmetric space.