The theory of foliations of manifolds was created in the forties of the last century by Ch. Ehresmann and G. Reeb [ER44]. Since then, the subject has enjoyed a rapid development and thousands of papers investigating foliations have appeared. A list of papers and preprints on foliations up to 1995 can be found in Tondeur [Ton97]. Due to the great interest of topologists and geometers in this rapidly ev- ving theory, many books on foliations have also been published one after the other. We mention, for example, the books written by: I. Tamura [Tam76], G. Hector and U. Hirsch [HH83], B. Reinhart [Rei83], C. Camacho and A.L. Neto [CN85], H. Kitahara [Kit86], P. Molino [Mol88], Ph. Tondeur [Ton88], [Ton97], V. Rovenskii [Rov98], A. Candel and L. Conlon [CC03]. Also, the survey written by H.B. Lawson, Jr. [Law74] had a great impact on the de- lopment of the theory of foliations. So it is natural to ask: why write yet another book on foliations? The answerisverysimple.Ourareasofinterestandinvestigationaredi?erent.The main theme of this book is to investigate the interrelations between foliations of a manifold on one hand, and the many geometric structures that the ma- foldmayadmitontheotherhand.
Amongthesestructureswemention:a?ne, Riemannian, semi-Riemannian, Finsler, symplectic, and contact structures.
- ISBN10 1280459840
- ISBN13 9781280459849
- Publish Date 1 January 2006 (first published 22 November 2005)
- Publish Status Active
- Out of Print 25 March 2015
- Publish Country US
- Imprint Springer
- Pages 300
- Language English