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Summary:
In his famous five variables paper Elie Cartan showed that one can canonically associate to a generic rank 2 distribution on a 5 dimensional manifold a Cartan geometry modeled on the homogeneous space $\tilde{G}_2/P$, where $P$ is one of the maximal parabolic subgroups of the exceptional Lie group $\tilde{G}_2$. In this article, we use the algebra of split octonions to give an explicit global description of the distribution corresponding to the homogeneous model.
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