Birkhoffian formulations of nonholonomic constrained systems (Q5945637)

If a nonholonomic system is transferred to a Hamilton-like environment by an appropriate Legendre transform, the resulting equations cannot generally be cast into a standard Hamiltonian form. From this observation, the authors propose a rather strange procedure to obtain what they call a Birkhoffian representation of the system. Essentially, it consists of the following steps: first take a further derivative of the given (first-order) constraint equations and combine these with the given second-order equations of the system; then, represent the resulting second-order system by an equivalent first-order one and try to find a suitable multiplier to turn this into a system of Birkhoff type. Even if this can always be done, in principle, it seems very unlikely that such a procedure might have any practical relevance. In fact, two illustrative examples which the authors present in the last section, are examples of cases where one does not apply the proposed procedure.