Stratifications and Finite Determinacy (Q4487548)

Stratification theory came into being due to R. Thom and H. Whitney in the study of varieties and of singularities of differentiable mappings in the mid 1960s to offer an answer to an important question: when are all the elements in a family of objects topologically equivalent? A stratification of a set is a locally finite partition of the set into manifolds, called strata satisfying the frontier condition: if one stratum is partly in the closure of another stratum then it is entirely in the closure of that other stratum. In this paper, the authors study a large class of regularity conditions on a stratified set, which generalize the (t) condition: a pair of adjacent strata \((X,Y)\) is (\(t^k\))-regular at \(y_0\) in \(Y\) if for every \(C^k\)-submanifold \(S\) transverse to \(Y\) at \(y_0 \in Y\cap S\), there is a neighbourhood of \(y_0\) in which \(S\) is transverse to \(X\) [\textit{R. Thom}, Differ. Analysis, Bombay Colloquium 1964, 191--202 (1964; Zbl 0151.32002)]. The authors, in fact, introduce very general microlocal conditions which include (t) for universals of arbitrary Hölderian continuity and differentiability classes. The salient feature of this paper is that the special cases of the conditions discussed by the authors are respectively equivalent to Verdier's (w)-condition, Whitney's (a)-condition, and relative versions (w)\(_f\) and (a)\(_f\) thereof. A rigorous analysis how their conditions transform under pushout and pullback by maps defining parametrised families of transversals to a stratum, is made and an extended result of \textit{T. Kuo} and the first author [Invent. Math. 92, No. 3, 633--643 (1988; Zbl 0653.57008)] is obtained. In course of this discussion, many results are deduced and a strengthened version of the \textit{J.-L. Verdier}'s isotropy theorem [Invent. Math. 36, 295--312 (1976; Zbl 0333.32010)] is proved. Lateron, a conjecture about bounding the number of topological types of germs of transverse intersections with a subanalytic set, made by the first author in 1981, is also proved.