Lakshmikantham Vangipuram Lakshmikantham – författare

This monograph aims to fill a void by making available a source book which first systematically describes all the available uniqueness and nonuniqueness criteria for ordinary differential equations, and compares and contrasts the merits of these criteria, and second, discusses open problems and offers some directions towards possible solutions.

The problems of modern society are both complex and multidisciplinary. In spite of the apparent diversity of problems, tools developed in one context are often adaptable to an entirely different situation. The concepts of Lyapunov stability have given rise to many new notions that are important in applications. Relative to each concept, there exists a sufficient literature parallel to Lyapunov''s theory of stability. It is natural to ask whether we can find a notion and develop the corresponding theory which unifies and includes a variety of known concepts of stability in a single set up. The answer is yes and it is the development of stability theory in terms of two measures. It is in this spirit the authors see the importance of the present monograph. Its aim is to present a systematic account of recent developments in the stability theory in terms of two distinct measures, describe the current state of the art, show the essential unity achieved by wealth of applications, and provide a unified general structure applicable to several nonlinear problems.

Many evolution processes are characterized by the fact that at certain moments of time they experience a change of state abruptly. These processes are subject to short-term perturbations whose duration is negligible in comparison with the duration of the process. Consequently, it is natural to assume that these perturbations act instantaneously, that is, in the form of impulses. It is known, for example, that many biological phenomena involving thresholds, bursting rhythm models in medicine and biology, optimal control models in economics, pharmacokinetics and frequency modulated systems, do exhibit impulsive effects. Thus impulsive differential equations, that is, differential equations involving impulse effects, appear as a natural description of observed evolution phenomena of several real world problems.