Differential Geometry - Proceedings Of The Viii International Colloquium

This volume contains research and expository papers on recent advances in foliations and Riemannian geometry. Some of the topics covered in this volume include: topology, geometry, dynamics and analysis of foliations, curvature, submanifold theory, Lie groups and harmonic maps.Among the contributions, readers may find an extensive survey on characteristic classes of Riemannian foliations offering also new results, an article showing the uniform simplicity of certain diffeomorphism groups, an exposition of convergences of contact structures to foliations from the point of view of Thurston's and Thurston-Bennequin's inequalities, a discussion about Fatou-Julia decompositions for foliations and a description of singular Riemannian foliations on spaces without conjugate points.Papers on submanifold theory focus on the existence of graphs with prescribed mean curvature and mean curvature flow for spacelike graphs, isometric and conformal deformations and detailed surveys on totally geodesic submanifolds in symmetric spaces, cohomogeneity one actions on hyperbolic spaces and rigidity of geodesic spheres in space forms. Geometric realizability of curvature tensors and curvature operators are also treated in this volume with special attention to the affine and the pseudo-Riemannian settings. Also, some contributions on biharmonic maps and submanifolds enrich the scope of this volume in providing an overview of different topics of current interest in differential geometry.