M2 grant for Peter Hochs: Foliate and conquer

The places on earth where days have the same length form the circles of constant latitude, and the north and south poles. This forms a foliation of the earth’s surface: a subdivision into lower-dimensional parts inside which points are related in some relevant way. Foliations encode crucial information on many different problems, and have therefore been studied and applied extensively over the last 80 years. Until recently, however, it was not possible to study foliations with singularities, like the poles in the example above. In this project, we develop new techniques to study and apply such singular foliations.