Finsler structures for the part metric and Hilbert's projective metric and applications to ordinary differential equations (Q1328981)

The author wants to show that a significant part of the theory of dynamical systems does not depend on the concept of monotonicity, but follows from results about nonexpansive, or more generally Lipschitz, maps of a metric space into itself. A first part of the paper is concerned with the search of useful criteria for the computation of the Lipschitz constant of maps in the part metric \(p\) or the Hilbert projective metric \(d\), without assuming monotonicity. These criteria are based on the study of minimal geodesics for \(p\) and \(d\) and of Finsler structures for \((S,p)\) and \((S,d)\), where \(S\) is a subset of a cone in a normed space. The third section is devoted to applications. The case of ordinary differential equations in finite dimensional spaces is considered. In particular, results concerning cooperative systems of differential equations are proved without monotonicity assumptions.