Topology of Foliations was first published in Japanese in 1976, with the principal aim of introducing the theory of foliations to young students. The author, Professor Itiro Tamura, passed away on February 21, 1991, during the preparation of the English translation of this successful book.
Professor Tamura worked on differential topology in the late 1950's. His results included establishing the non-homotopy-invariance of the Pontrjagin classes, demonstrating the existence of a topological eight-manifold with no differential structure, etc. He began working on the theory of foliations in the late 1960's and made an important contribution to the problem of the existence of foliations on closed manifolds in 1971: he constructed codimension-one foliations on every odd-dimensional homotopy sphere. This was done by showing the existence of spinnable structures on such manifolds. This work stimulated the study of foliations, which grew very rapidly in the 1970's.
At almost the same time as the publication of the original version of this book, the problem of the existence of foliations on closed manifolds was solved by W. Thurston. Much work in foliation theory has been done since 1976. An important part of this work was done by Tamura's students, who had read the original version of Topology of Foliations, as the author had hoped.
The author himself was active in the theory of foliations. He initiated the theory of transverse foliations. In the last several years of his life, he was studying the Seifert conjecture and the minimal flow conjecture. I regret very much that he could not continue his research.
The Topology of Foliations was translated into Russian in 1979. Now an English translation has been completed and many more students of mathematics can touch the spirit of Itiro Tamura.