An integrable flow on a family of Hilbert Grassmannians.
This paper is a gentle introduction to some recent results involving the theory of gerbes over orbifolds for topologists, geometers and physicists. We introduce gerbes on manifolds, orbifolds, the Dixmier-Douady class, Beilinson-Deligne orbifold cohomology, Cheeger-Simons orbifold cohomology and string connections.
We define an invariant of contact structures and foliations (on Riemannian manifolds of nonpositive sectional curvature) which is upper semi-continuous with respect to deformations and thus gives an obstruction to the topology of foliations which can be approximated by isotopies of a given contact structure.