This book covers recent topics in various aspects of foliation theory and its relation with other areas including dynamical systems, C∗-algebras, index theory and low-dimensional topology. It contains survey articles by G Hector, S Hurder and P Molino, as well as more than 20 original papers by specialists who are currently most active in the field.

This volume is a compilation of new results and surveys on the current state of some aspects of the foliation theory presented during the conference “FOLIATIONS 2012”. It contains recent materials on foliation theory which is related to differential geometry, the theory of dynamical systems and differential topology. Both the original research and survey articles found in here should inspire students and researchers interested in foliation theory and the related fields to plan his/her further research.

This volume contains surveys and research articles regarding different aspects of the theory of foliation. The main aspects concern the topology of foliations of low-dimensional manifolds, the geometry of foliated Riemannian manifolds and the dynamical properties of foliations. Among the surveys are lecture notes devoted to the analysis of some operator algebras on foliated manifolds and the theory of confoliations (objects defined recently by W Thurston and Y Eliashberg, situated between foliations and contact structures). Among the research articles one can find a detailed proof of an unpublished theorem (due to Duminy) concerning ends of leaves in exceptional minimal sets.

Contains surveys and research articles regarding different aspects of the theory of foliation.

This book provides a detailed introduction to the coarse quasi-isometry of leaves of a foliated space and describes the cases where the generic leaves have the same quasi-isometric invariants. Every leaf of a compact foliated space has an induced coarse quasi-isometry type, represented by the coarse metric defined by the length of plaque chains given by any finite foliated atlas. When there are dense leaves either all dense leaves without holonomy are uniformly coarsely quasi-isometric to each other, or else every leaf is coarsely quasi-isometric to just meagerly many other leaves. Moreover, if all leaves are dense, the first alternative is characterized by a condition on the leaves called coarse quasi-symmetry. Similar results are proved for more specific coarse invariants, like growth type, asymptotic dimension, and amenability. The Higson corona of the leaves is also studied. All the results are richly illustrated with examples. The book is primarily aimed at researchers on foliated spaces. More generally, specialists in geometric analysis, topological dynamics, or metric geometry may also benefit from it.

Noncommutative differential geometry is a new approach to classical geometry. It was originally used by Fields Medalist A. Connes in the theory of foliations, where it led to striking extensions of Atiyah-Singer index theory. It also may be applicable to hitherto unsolved geometric phenomena and physical experiments. However, noncommutative differential geometry was not well understood even among mathematicians. Therefore, an international symposium on commutative differential geometry and its applications to physics was held in Japan, in July 1999. Topics covered included: deformation problems, Poisson groupoids, operad theory, quantization problems, and D-branes. The meeting was attended by both mathematicians and physicists, which resulted in interesting discussions. This volume contains the refereed proceedings of this symposium. Providing a state of the art overview of research in these topics, this book is suitable as a source book for a seminar in noncommutative geometry and physics.