A historical review on nonholomic mechanics (Q1935058)

The objective of this paper is to give a brief historical overview of nonholonomic mechanics with special emphasis on the latest developments. It starts with some historical developments due to Herz, Poincaré, and the Russian school of mechanics, continues with works from the beginning of the 1980s, which introduce the modern language of differential geometry into the description of nonholonomic mechanical systems. The last part of the paper is devoted to the latest results in Hamilton-Jakobi theory for nonholonomic dynamics using an approach due to the authors.