Laminations and Foliations in Dynamics, Geometry and Topology


Book Description

This volume is based on a conference held at SUNY, Stony Brook (NY). The concepts of laminations and foliations appear in a diverse number of fields, such as topology, geometry, analytic differential equations, holomorphic dynamics, and renormalization theory. Although these areas have developed deep relations, each has developed distinct research fields with little interaction among practitioners. The conference brought together the diverse points of view of researchers from different areas. This book includes surveys and research papers reflecting the broad spectrum of themes presented at the event. Of particular interest are the articles by F. Bonahon, "Geodesic Laminations on Surfaces", and D. Gabai, "Three Lectures on Foliations and Laminations on 3-manifolds", which are based on minicourses that took place during the conference.




Foliations: Dynamics, Geometry and Topology


Book Description

This book is an introduction to several active research topics in Foliation Theory and its connections with other areas. It contains expository lectures showing the diversity of ideas and methods converging in the study of foliations. The lectures by Aziz El Kacimi Alaoui provide an introduction to Foliation Theory with emphasis on examples and transverse structures. Steven Hurder's lectures apply ideas from smooth dynamical systems to develop useful concepts in the study of foliations: limit sets and cycles for leaves, leafwise geodesic flow, transverse exponents, Pesin Theory and hyperbolic, parabolic and elliptic types of foliations. The lectures by Masayuki Asaoka compute the leafwise cohomology of foliations given by actions of Lie groups, and apply it to describe deformation of those actions. In his lectures, Ken Richardson studies the properties of transverse Dirac operators for Riemannian foliations and compact Lie group actions, and explains a recently proved index formula. Besides students and researchers of Foliation Theory, this book will be interesting for mathematicians interested in the applications to foliations of subjects like Topology of Manifolds, Differential Geometry, Dynamics, Cohomology or Global Analysis.




Foliations and the Geometry of 3-Manifolds


Book Description

This unique reference, aimed at research topologists, gives an exposition of the 'pseudo-Anosov' theory of foliations of 3-manifolds. This theory generalizes Thurston's theory of surface automorphisms and reveals an intimate connection between dynamics, geometry and topology in 3 dimensions. Significant themes returned to throughout the text include the importance of geometry, especially the hyperbolic geometry of surfaces, the importance of monotonicity, especially in1-dimensional and co-dimensional dynamics, and combinatorial approximation, using finite combinatorical objects such as train-tracks, branched surfaces and hierarchies to carry more complicated continuous objects.




Geometry, Topology and Dynamics of Character Varieties


Book Description

This book aims to describe, for readers uneducated in science, the development of humanity's desire to know and understand the world around us through the various stages of its development to the present, when science is almost universally recognized - at least in the Western world - as the most reliable way of knowing. The book describes the history of the large-scale exploration of the surface of the earth by sea, beginning with the Vikings and the Chinese, and of the unknown interiors of the American and African continents by foot and horseback. After the invention of the telescope, visual exploration of the surfaces of the Moon and Mars were made possible, and finally a visit to the Moon. The book then turns to our legacy from the ancient Greeks of wanting to understand rather than just know, and why the scientific way of understanding is valued. For concreteness, it relates the lives and accomplishments of six great scientists, four from the nineteenth century and two from the twentieth. Finally, the book explains how chemistry came to be seen as the most basic of the sciences, and then how physics became the most fundamental.




Foliations: Geometry And Dynamics - Proceedings Of The Euroworkshop


Book Description

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.







Moduli Spaces of Riemann Surfaces


Book Description

Mapping class groups and moduli spaces of Riemann surfaces were the topics of the Graduate Summer School at the 2011 IAS/Park City Mathematics Institute. This book presents the nine different lecture series comprising the summer school, covering a selection of topics of current interest. The introductory courses treat mapping class groups and Teichmüller theory. The more advanced courses cover intersection theory on moduli spaces, the dynamics of polygonal billiards and moduli spaces, the stable cohomology of mapping class groups, the structure of Torelli groups, and arithmetic mapping class groups. The courses consist of a set of intensive short lectures offered by leaders in the field, designed to introduce students to exciting, current research in mathematics. These lectures do not duplicate standard courses available elsewhere. The book should be a valuable resource for graduate students and researchers interested in the topology, geometry and dynamics of moduli spaces of Riemann surfaces and related topics. Titles in this series are co-published with the Institute for Advanced Study/Park City Mathematics Institute. Members of the Mathematical Association of America (MAA) and the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) receive a 20% discount from list price.




Partially Hyperbolic Dynamics, Laminations, and Teichmuller Flow


Book Description

This volume collects a set of contributions by participants of the Workshop Partially hyperbolic dynamics, laminations, and Teichmuller flow held at the Fields Institute in Toronto in January 2006. The Workshop brought together several leading experts in two very active fields of contemporary dynamical systems theory: partially hyperbolic dynamics and Teichmuller dynamics. They are unified by ideas coming from the theory of laminations and foliations, dynamical hyperbolicity, and ergodic theory. These are the main themes of the current volume. The volume contains both surveys and research papers on non-uniform and partial hyperbolicity, on dominated splitting and beyond (in Part I), Teichmuller dynamics with applications to interval exchange transformations and on the topology of moduli spaces of quadratic differentials (in Part II), foliations and laminations and other miscellaneous papers (in Part III). Taken together these papers provide a snapshot of the state of the art in some of the most active topics at the crossroads between dynamical systems, smooth ergodic theory, geometry and topology, suitable for advanced graduate students and researchers.Non-specialists will find the extensive, in-depth surveys especially useful.




Geometric Complex Analysis


Book Description

The KSCV Symposium, the Korean Conference on Several Complex Variables, started in 1997 in an effort to promote the study of complex analysis and geometry. Since then, the conference met semi-regularly for about 10 years and then settled on being held biannually. The sixth and tenth conferences were held in 2002 and 2014 as satellite conferences to the Beijing International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) and the Seoul ICM, respectively. The purpose of the KSCV Symposium is to organize the research talks of many leading scholars in the world, to provide an opportunity for communication, and to promote new researchers in this field.




Canonical Wick Rotations in 3-Dimensional Gravity


Book Description

The authors develop a canonical Wick rotation-rescaling theory in $3$-dimensional gravity. This includes (a) A simultaneous classification: this shows how maximal globally hyperbolic spacetimes of arbitrary constant curvature, which admit a complete Cauchy surface and canonical cosmological time, as well as complex projective structures on arbitrary surfaces, are all different materializations of ``more fundamental'' encoding structures. (b) Canonical geometric correlations: this shows how spacetimes of different curvature, that share a same encoding structure, are related to each other by canonical rescalings, and how they can be transformed by canonical Wick rotations in hyperbolic $3$-manifolds, that carry the appropriate asymptotic projective structure. Both Wick rotations and rescalings act along the canonical cosmological time and have universal rescaling functions. These correlations are functorial with respect to isomorphisms of the respective geometric categories.