Alain Hénaut: Introduction to web geometry

This is the first lecture of a mini-course on web geometry to be held in the period August 23 - September 2. Web geometry was initiated mainly by Wilhelm Blaschke and taken up by his student Shiing-Shen Chern, and later also by Phillip Griffiths.The subject is devoted to the study of families of foliations which are in genertal position. We shall restrict ourselves to the local situation, in a neighborhood of the origin in $\mathbb{C}^2$ with $d\ge 1$ complex analytic foliations of curves, and we consider properties of such $d$-webs which are invariant with respect to local isomorphisms of $\mathbb{C}^2$.