Nonholonomic connections following Elie Cartan
by
Jair Koiller
Laboratorio Nacional de Computacao Cientifica, Brazil

n this note we revisit E. Cartan's address at the 1928 International Congress of Mathematicians at Bologna, Italy. Cartan considered a special class of distributions, of length 1. We set up the groundwork for using Cartan's method of equivalence to the general case. We also present a set of ODEs giving at the same time the solution curve, a mirror curve on a fixed tangent plane, and a parallel frame along the solution.

Date received: July 17, 2000

Copyright © 2000 by the author(s). The author(s) of this document and the organizers of the conference have granted their consent to include this abstract in Atlas Conferences Inc. Document # cafh-42.