6. Miscellaneous
-
Problem 6.1.
If two smooth manifolds M_1 and M_2 are homeomorphic, could their spaces of Engel structures be used to distinguish them smoothly?-
Remark. One could try to connect Engel structures to gauge theoretic invariants, or to symplectic structures. The latter are known to distinguish certain smooth structures.
-
-
Problem 6.2.
Are there examples of pairs (n,k) with n>k\ge2 such that for any parallelizable n manifold, there exists a k-plane field \mathcal{D}\subset TM with maximal growth vector?-
Remark. More generally, instead of parallelizability, one would like to assume only that one is dealing with manifolds admitting appropriate partial flags.
-
Cite this as: AimPL: Engel structures, available at http://aimpl.org/engelstr.