Geometry of Third-Order Ordinary Differential Equations and Its Applications in General Relativity

A PhD thesis written under supervision of Pawel Nurowski and defended at the Faculty of Physics of the University of Warsaw. We adress the problems of local equivalence and geometry of third order ODEs modulo contact, point and fibre-preserving transformations of variables. Several new and already known geometries are described in a uniform manner by the Cartan method of equivalence. This includes conformal, Weyl and metric geometries in three and six dimensions and contact projective geometry in dimension three. Respective connections for these geometries are given and their curvatures are expressed by contact, point or fibre-preserving relative invariants of the ODEs. We construct Cartan coframes which yield the full set of local invariants and solve the local problem of contact and point equivalence of the ODEs. We explicitly describe ODEs admitting at least four-dimensional Lie group of contact or point symmetries and real ODEs fibre-preserving equivalent to II, IV, V, VI, VII and XI Chazy classes.