Archive for March, 2009

The purpose of the seminar is to give an introduction to the technique of Cartan connections. This is a tool to study geometric structures by comparing them to certain homogeneous model structures. The approach goes back to Elie Cartan’s method of moving frames. It has been refined by Ehresmann, Tanaka and others who combined this with Lie algebra techniques and representation theory. Cartan connections are intensively used in modern conformal geometry as well as in CR geometry (the geometry of real submanifolds of complex manifolds).