Ganea and Whitehead definitions for the tangential Lusternik–Schnirelmann category of foliations

This work solves the problem of elaborating Ganea and Whitehead definitions for the tangential category of a foliated manifold. We develop these two notions in the category S-Top of stratified spaces, that are topological spaces X endowed with a partition F and compare them to a third invariant defined by using open sets. More precisely, these definitions apply to an element (X,F) of S-Top together with a class A of subsets of X; they are similar to invariants introduced by M. Clapp and D. Puppe.If (X,F)∈S-Top, we define a transverse subset as a subspace A of X such that the intersection S∩A is at most countable for any S∈F. Then we define the Whitehead and Ganea LS-categories of the stratified space by taking the infimum along the transverse subsets. When we have a closed manifold, endowed with a C1-foliation, the three previous definitions, with A the class of transverse subsets, coincide with the tangential category and are homotopical invariants.