Local Surgery Obstructions and Space Forms.
We introduce basic characteristic classes and numbers as new invariants for Riemannian foliations. If the ambient Riemannian manifold is complete, simply connected (or more generally if the foliation is a transversely orientable Killing foliation) and if the space of leaf closures is compact, then the basic characteristic numbers are determined by the infinitesimal dynamical behavior of the foliation at the union of its closed leaves. In fact, they can be computed with an Atiyah-Bott-Berline-Vergne-type...
We show that if X, Y are smooth, compact k-dimensional submanifolds of ℝⁿ and 2k+2 ≤ n, then each diffeomorphism ϕ: X → Y can be extended to a diffeomorphism Φ: ℝⁿ → ℝⁿ which is tame (to be defined in this paper). Moreover, if X, Y are real analytic manifolds and the mapping ϕ is analytic, then we can choose Φ to be also analytic. We extend this result to some interesting categories of closed (not necessarily compact) subsets of ℝⁿ, namely, to the category of Nash submanifolds...