Symbolic Computation Group

Briefly speaking this talk is about an old topic of finding closed-form solutions of UNDERDETERMINED systems of nonlinear ODEs, started by G. Monge in 1784 and later followed by Goursat (1905), Hilbert (1913) and Cartan (1914). In the last decades of the XX century it drew the attention of specialists in nonlinear control. In particular, the technique of this problem was used in developing motion algorithms for nonholonomic mechanical systems, a typical example being a car with N trailers. Trying to park such a monster moving back... Monge helps!