Non-holonomic connections following Elie Cartan

In this note we revisit E. Cartan's address at the 1928 International Congr ess of Mathematicians at Bologna, Italy. The distributions considered here will be of the same class as those considered by Cartan, a special type whi ch we call strongly or maximally non-holonomic. We set up the groundwork fo r using Cartan's method of equivalence (a powerful tool for obtaining invar iants associated to geometrical objects), to more general non-holonomic dis tributions.