Talk:Cartan's equivalence method

I need help outsourcing this to other pages as much as possible. Silly rabbit 04:48, 10 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

As I understand it, the 'method' is in his hands a bit less than algorithmic? It does however have the key idea that the graph of the 'diffeomorphism to construct' is to be constructed by setting up differential forms and thus a differential system for which the graph is a solution manifold (locally ...). Forgive me if this sounds a naive description. As for things on other pages, yes, it is often easier to work on some of the prerequisites first, and then write higher-level pages as hypertext quite dependent on others things. This tends to take a little longer to do than one might expect. On the other hand the alternative is to write pages dense with red links and hope to fill those out later. I don't think there is a single, right way to do it; in the end one has to nduce some sort of 'organic growth' in the coverage here so the top-level contributions don't seem too isolated. Charles Matthews 10:16, 10 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

You are right, it is less than algorithmic because the process may not always terminate. As for a description of the method, or "algorithm" (although the terminology is not my own), it is hideously complex. Silly rabbit 15:45, 10 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]