Élie Cartan’s geometrical vision or how to avoid expression swell

Abstract

The aim of the paper is to demonstrate the superiority of Cartan’s method over direct methods based on differential elimination for handling otherwise intractable equivalence problems. In this sense, using our implementation of Cartan’s method, we establish two new equivalence results. We establish when a system of second order ODEs is equivalent to flat system (second derivations are zero), and when a system of holomorphic PDEs with two independent variables and one dependent variable is flat. We consider the problem of finding transformation that brings a given equation to the target one. We shall see that this problem becomes algebraic when the symmetry pseudogroup of the target equation is zerodimensional. We avoid the swelling of the expressions, by using non-commutative derivations adapted to the problem.