Nicolas Stutz

In this talk, we will discuss Engel structures with a split through three examples. These geometric structures appear on differential manifolds of dimension four as rank-two distributions together with a decomposition into two preferred line fields. We will first consider the configuration space of a car moving in a plane, then we will look at third-order differential equations and finally we will present the geometry of pointed lightlike geodesics in three-dimensional Lorentzian manifolds.