On the Inner Automorphisms of a Singular Foliation

Abstract

A singular foliation in the sense of Androulidakis and Skandalis is an involutive and locally finitely generated module of compactly supported vector fields on a manifold. An automorphism of a singular foliation is a diffeomorphism that preserves the module. In this note, we give an alternative proof of the (surprisingly non-trivial) fundamental fact that the time-one flow of an element of a singular foliation (i.e. its exponential) is an automorphism of the singular foliation.