Classifying Foliations
Classifying foliations Steven Hurder Abstract. We give a survey of the approaches to classifying foliations, start- ing with the Haefliger classifying spaces and the various results and examples about the secondary classes of foliations. Various dynamical properties of fo- liations are introduced and discussed, including expansion rate, local entropy, and orbit growth rates. This leads to a decomposition of the foliated space into Borel or measurable components with these various dynamical types. The dynamical structure is compared with the classification via secondary classes. 1991 Mathematics Subject Classification. Primary 22F05, 37C85, 57R20, 57R32, 58H05, 58H10; Secondary 37A35, 37A55, 37C35 . Key words and phrases. Foliations, differentiable groupoids, smooth dynamical systems, er- godic theory, classifying spaces, secondary characteristic classes . The author was supported in part by NSF Grant #0406254. 1 2 STEVEN HURDER 1. Introduction A basic problem of foliation theory is how to \classify all the foliations" of fixed codimension-q on a given closed manifold M, assuming that at least one such foliation exists on M. This survey concerns this classification problem for foliations. Kaplan [192] proved the first complete classification result in the subject in 1941. For a foliation F of the plane by lines (no closed orbits) the leaf space T = R2=F is a (possibly non-Hausdorff) 1-manifold, and F is characterized up to homeomorphism by the leaf space T . (See also [126, 127, 324].) Palmeira [252] proved an analogous result for the case of foliations of simply connected manifolds by hyperplanes. Research on classification advanced dramatically in 1970, with three seminal works: Bott's Vanishing Theorem [28], Haefliger’s construction of a \classifying space" for foliations [119, 120], and Thurston's profound results on existence and classifi- cation of foliations [297, 298, 299, 300], in terms of the homotopy theory of Haefliger’s classifying spaces BΓq.
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