Notes on fold maps obtained by surgery operations and algebraic information of their Reeb spaces

Abstract: The theory of Morse functions and their higher dimensional versions or fold maps on manifolds and its application to geometric theory of manifolds is one of important branches of geometry and mathematics. Studies related to this was started in 1950s by differential topologists such as Thom and Whitney and they have been studied actively. In this paper, we study fold maps obtained by surgery operations to fundamental fold maps, and especially Reeb spaces, defined as the spaces of all connected components of preimages and in suitable situations inheriting fundamental and important algebraic invariants such as (co)homology groups. Reeb spaces are fundamental and important tools in studying manifolds also in general. The author has already studied about homology groups of the Reeb spaces and obtained several results and in this paper, we study about their cohomology rings for several specific cases, as more precise information. These studies are motivated by a problem that construction of explicit fold maps is important in investigating (the worlds of explicit classes of) manifolds in geometric and constructive ways and difficult. It is not so difficult to construct these maps for simplest manifolds such as standard spheres, products of standard spheres and manifolds represented as their connected sums. We see various types of cohomology rings of Reeb spaces via systematic construction of fold maps.