Reductions of path structures and classification of homogeneous structures in dimension three

Abstract

In this paper we show that if a path structure has non-vanishing curvature at a point then it has a canonical reduction to a Z/2Z-structure at a neighbourhood of that point (in many cases it has a canonical parallelism). A simple implication of this result is that the automorphism group of a non-flat path structure is of maximal dimension three (a result by Tresse of 1896). We also classify the invariant path structures on three-dimensional Lie groups.