characterization of several classes of second-order odes by using differential invariants描述的几类二阶常微分方程,利用微分不变量.pdfVIP

CHARACTERIZATION OF SEVERAL CLASSES OF SECOND-ORDER ODEs BY USING DIFFERENTIAL INVARIANTS ´ ˜ ´ A. MARTIN DEL REY AND J. MUNOZ MASQUE Received 20 January 2005 and in revised form 12 September 2005 Several classes of second-order ordinary differential equations are characterized intrin- sically by means of differential invariants. The method is proved to be computationally feasible. 1. Introduction The classical theory of differential invariants for second-order ODEs (e.g., see [24, 25, 36, 37, 39, 52, 53]) has experienced a notable development in the last decade. It is due to the interest of its geometric applications (see [2, 14, 17, 18, 20, 21, 22, 23, 26, 27, 28, 34, 35, 42, 45, 49]) and, very specially, due to the new computational aspects of that theory in applying it to a wide class problems, such as symmetries, conservation laws, order reduc- tion; for example, see [3, 4, 5, 6, 9, 10, 15, 16, 29, 30, 31, 32, 38, 43, 44, 48, 50]. The goal of this paper is to characterize several classes of second-order ODEs by using differen- tial invariants with respect to the subgroups of horizontal and vertical transformations of the plane, which are defined and studied in Sections 2.1, 2.2, and 2.3 below. Basically, the method supplies a criterion to know whether a given second-order ordinary differen- tial equation can be put, after a change of variables belonging to one of the two groups under consideration, into a specific normal form. In each case, the criterion reduces to check the vanishing of several algebraic expressions written in terms of differential in- variants and, hence, we can recognize whether a concrete equation belongs to a specific normal form by simply running an algorithm in polynomial time. The problem of char- acterization of ordinary differential equations has been tackled by some authors in the last decades (see, e.g., [5, 17, 18, 20, 22, 23, 26, 27, 34, 35]). All these works