Differentiable Montgomery-Samelson Fiberings with Finite Singular Sets

Abstract

In 1946 Montgomery and Samelson (11) introduced a generalization of the notion of a differentiable group action with one type of orbit besides fixed points. Such an object is essentially a locally trivial fibering except on a certain singular set over which fibres are pinched to points. In recent years there has been a fair amount of research on these MS-fiberings and similar singular fiberings. This paper is another effort in this direction. For a fairly complete bibliography of the literature, the reader should consult the references, and in particular, (5).Let f: Mn → Sp, with Mn a closed connected n-manifold and Sp the unit p-sphere with standard differentiable structure, be the projection map of a smooth MS-fibering with finite non-empty singular set.