Foliations and webs inducing Galois coverings

We introduce the notion of Galois holomorphic foliation on the complex projective space as that of foliations whose Gauss map is a Galois covering when restricted to an appropriate Zariski open subset. First, we establish general criteria assuring that a rational map between projective manifolds of the same dimension defines a Galois covering. Then, these criteria are used to give a geometric characterization of Galois foliations in terms of their inflection divisor and their singularities. We also characterize Galois foliations on $\mathbb P^2$ admitting continuous symmetries, obtaining a complete classification of Galois homogeneous foliations

Local symplectic field theory

Generalizing local Gromov-Witten theory, in this paper we define a local version of symplectic field theory. When the symplectic manifold with cylindrical ends is four-dimensional and the underlying simple curve is regular by automatic transversality, we establish a transversality result for all its multiple covers and discuss the resulting algebraic structures

Contact structures, deformations and taut foliations

Using deformations of foliations to contact structures as well as rigidity properties of Anosov foliations we provide infinite families of examples which show that the space of taut foliations in a given homotopy class of plane fields is in general not path connected. Similar methods also show that the space of representations of the fundamental group of a hyperbolic surface to the group of smooth diffeomorphisms of the circle with fixed Euler class is in general not path connected. As an important step along the way we resolve the question of which universally tight contact structures on Seifert fibered spaces are deformations of taut or Reebless foliations when the genus of the base is positive or the twisting number of the contact structure in the sense of Giroux is non-negative.Comment: 37 pages, 2 figures; Improved exposition incorporating referee's comments mainly in Sections 5 and 9. (To appear in Geom. Topol.

Subdivision Directional Fields

We present a novel linear subdivision scheme for face-based tangent directional fields on triangle meshes. Our subdivision scheme is based on a novel coordinate-free representation of directional fields as halfedge-based scalar quantities, bridging the finite-element representation with discrete exterior calculus. By commuting with differential operators, our subdivision is structure-preserving: it reproduces curl-free fields precisely, and reproduces divergence-free fields in the weak sense. Moreover, our subdivision scheme directly extends to directional fields with several vectors per face by working on the branched covering space. Finally, we demonstrate how our scheme can be applied to directional-field design, advection, and robust earth mover's distance computation, for efficient and robust computation