On completeness of quadratic systems (Q544186)

A non-autonomous differential equation \(y'=f(t,y)\), \(y\in{\mathbb R}^k\), is called complete if every solution exists for all \(t\in{\mathbb R}\). This paper studies the completeness of non-autonomous quadratic systems of the form \(y'=f_0(t)+f_1(t)y+f_2(t,y)\), \(y\in{\mathbb R}^k\), where \(f_0(t)\) is a column vector, \(f_1(t)\) is a \(k\times k\) matrix and \(f_2(t,y)_n=(y^{t} f_{2,n}(t) y)\), with each \(f_{2,n}(t)\) a low triangular matrix, being all the involved functions of \(t\) continuous and bounded. The main result of this work is that when \(y^tf_2(t,y)\equiv0\) the differential equation is complete. Two different proofs are provided, one using the Gronwall lemma and another one using a suitable compactification. In particular, the well-know autonomous 3-dimensional Lorenz system belongs to this class of complete quadratic systems, for all values of its parameters. It can be seen that the dimension of the space of all the quadratic differential equations is \(K=k(k+1)(k+2)/2\) and as a consequence of the above result it holds that the dimension of the complete ones is at least \(2K/3\). The authors also study some sufficient conditions for a differential equation to be incomplete.