Geodesics on the ellipsoid and monodromy (Q2475444): Difference between revisions

The geodesic flow on the ellipsoid is a notable dynamical system attracting a great interest since the time of Jacobi who had proved its integrability in the nineteenth century. The focus of the recent studies was on its generalization from three to higher dimensions and clarifying the topology of Liouville foliations. The degenerate cases when some of the ellipsoid axes become equal are of special interest, too. The paper under review is concerned with the case of the geodesic motions on the ellipsoid in \({\mathbb R}^4\) when the two middle axes are equal. Besides the fine description of the topology of the energy-momentum map, the authors present in explicit form the monodromy matrix which was computed by making use of the respective action variables. As a whole, the paper is quite informative and well written.