Differential invariants of webs on two-dimensional manifolds (Q750913)

An n-web of curves on a two-dimensional manifold appears naturally as a web of characteristic curves of a hyperbolic system of differential equations of first order with two independent variables. For such a web scalar differential invariants are found. This allows the authors to find many properties of n-webs. In particular, they find some new necessary and sufficient conditions for an n-web to be parallelizable. Remarks: The authors use the term ``linear'' instead of ``parallelizable''. However, in web theory an n-web is linear it it is equivalent to an n-web consisting of n families of straight lines, and it is parallelizable if the straight lines of each of the families indicated above are parallel.]