Confoliations

Download or read book Confoliations written by Y. Eliashberg and published by American Mathematical Soc.. This book was released on 1998 with total page 66 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents the first steps of a theory of confoliations designed to link geometry and topology of three-dimensional contact structures with the geometry and topology of codimension-one foliations on three-dimensional manifolds. Developing almost independently, these theories at first glance belonged to two different worlds: The theory of foliations is part of topology and dynamical systems, while contact geometry is the odd-dimensional 'brother' of symplectic geometry. However, both theories have developed a number of striking similarities. Confoliations - which interpolate between contact structures and codimension-one foliations - should help us to understand better links between the two theories. These links provide tools for transporting results from one field to the other.It's features include: a unified approach to the topology of codimension-one foliations and contact geometry; insight on the geometric nature of integrability; and, new results, in particular on the perturbation of confoliations into contact structures.