On the canonical forms of 3x3 non-diagonalizable hyperbolic systems with real constant coefficients (Q2367467)

Consider an \(m \times m\) system of differential equations (1) \({\partial u \over \partial t}=\sum^ n_{i=1} A_ i {\partial u \over \partial x_ i}\) where \(u\) is an \(m\)-vector and \(A_ i\) are real constant \(m \times m\) matrix coefficients. According to Gårding, (1) is called a hyperbolic system if the real linear combination \(\sum \xi_ iA_ i\) has only real eigenvalues for any choice of \(\xi_ 1\), \(\xi_ 2,\dots,\xi_ n \in \mathbb{R}\). In the previous paper [ibid., 937-982 (1991)], we fully studied a special subclass of \(3\times 3\) systems \((m=3)\) where each \(\sum \xi_ iA_ i\) is similar to a real diagonal matrix. The purpose of this paper is to classify the remaining subclass of \(3 \times 3\) systems.