Contact Structures of Partial Differential Equations

Pieter Thijs Eendebak

In the period 2002-2006 I wrote my Ph.D. thesis "Contact Structures of Partial Differential Equations". The research was done together with my promotor prof.dr. J.J. Duistermaat. On this webpage you can find a short description of the content of the thesis and find the Maple packages used to perform calculations in the thesis. The two main themes in my dissertation are contact structures and symmetry methods for partial differential equations. The two classes of partial differential equations that are studied in my dissertation are the first order systems for two functions of the variables and the second order scalar equations in two variables.

A PDF file with my dissertation: Contact Structures of Partial Differential Equations (revised version). The thesis is also available on the University library Igitur. The ISBN number for the thesis is: ISBN-10: 90-393-4435-3, ISBN-13: 978-90-393-4435-4. A BibTex entry can be found here. A list with corrections.

Some information related to the Ph.D. thesis:

• The description of the NWO project Contact structures of second order partial differential equations.
• The slides of my talk on the Cauchy-Kowalevski and the Cartan-Kähler theorem.
• My Master's thesis on geometric partial differential equations and contact transformations.
• The slides of my talk at the VU Dynamic Analysis seminar (November 1st 2006) on "Contact Structures and Projections Methods".
• The slides of my talk at the UU general colloquium (December 7th 2006) on "Contact Structures and Projections Methods".