arXiv subjects
Publications and source records attributed to Jean Pradines.
Reprint of a 1989 paper including minor corrections of misprints. Added comments (11 pages) about later related papers in the literature concerning comparison of Gabriel-Zisman calculus of (right) fractions and the use of generalized morphims in the sense of Haefliger-Skandalis-Hilsum for inverting differentiable equivalences between Lie groupoids.
This is a survey concerning the relationship between Lie Groupoids (and their morphisms) and singular foliations in the sense of Sussmann-Stefan (considered from a purely geometrical point of view). We focus on the interaction between the algebraic and differentiable structures underlying Lie groupoids, and between groups and graphs of equivalence relations, regarded as two basic degeneracies for groupoids. Historical remarks, motivations and examples are developed in five appendices.
Starting with some motivating examples (classical atlases for a manifold, space of leaves of a foliation, group orbits), we propose to view a Lie groupoid as a generalized atlas for the "virtual structure" of its orbit space, the equivalence between atlases being here the smooth Morita equivalence. This "structure" keeps memory of the isotropy groups and of the smoothness as well. To take the smoothness into account, we claim that we can go very far by retaining just a few formal properties of embeddings and surmersions, yielding a very polymorphous unifying theory. We suggest further developments.
For a smooth (locally trivial) principal bundle in Ehresmann's sense, the relation between the commuting vertical and horizontal actions of the structural Lie group and the structural Lie groupoid (isomorphisms between vertical fibers) is regarded as a special case of a symmetrical concept of conjugation between "principal" Lie groupoid actions, allowing possibly non-locally trivial bundles. A diagrammatic description of this concept via a symmetric "butterfly diagram" allows its "internalization" in a wide class of categories (used by "working mathematicians") whenever they are endowed with two distinguished classes of monomorphisms and epimorphisms mimicking the properties of embeddings and surjective submersions. As an application, a general theorem of "universal activation" encompasses in a unified way such various situations as Palais' theory of globalization for partial action laws, the realization of non-abelian cocycles (including Haefliger cocycles for foliations) or the description of the "homogeneous space" attached to an embedding of Lie groups (still valid for Lie groupoids).