Tuesday Seminar on Topology

Seminar information archive ~03/28Next seminarFuture seminars 03/29~

Date, time & place Tuesday 17:00 - 18:30 056Room #056 (Graduate School of Math. Sci. Bldg.)
Organizer(s) KAWAZUMI Nariya, KITAYAMA Takahiro, SAKASAI Takuya

2006/10/10

16:30-18:00   Room #056 (Graduate School of Math. Sci. Bldg.)
Elmar Vogt (Frie Universitat Berlin)
Estimating Lusternik-Schnirelmann Category for Foliations:A Survey of Available Techniques
[ Abstract ]
The Lusternik-Schnirelmann category of a space $X$ is the smallest number $r$ such that $X$ can be covered by $r + 1$ open sets which are contractible in $X$.For foliated manifolds there are several notions generalizing this concept, all of them due
to Helen Colman. We are mostly concerned with the concept of tangential Lusternik-Schnirelmann category (tangential LS-category). Here one requires a covering by open sets $U$ with the following property. There is a leafwise homotopy starting with the inclusion of $U$ and ending in a map that throws for each leaf $F$ of the foliation each component of $U \\cap F$ onto a single point. A leafwise homotopy is a homotopy moving points only inside leaves. Rather than presenting the still very few results obtained about the LS category of foliations, we survey techniques, mostly quite elementary, to estimate the tangential LS-category from below and above.