Boundedness of solutions of a class of higher order ordinary differential equations (Q788882)

For given functions \(p_ 0(t),...,p_ n(t)\) and F(t,x), f(t) consider the n-th order differential equation \[ (*)\quad D^ n(x;p_ 0,...,p_ n)+F(t,x)=f(t) \] where the ''quasi-derivative of order i'' is defined recursively by \(D^ 0(x;p_ 0)=x(t)/p_ 0(t)\) and \[ D^ i(x;p_ 0,...,p_ i)=(1/p_ i(t))(d/dt)D^{i-1}(x;p_ 0,...,p_{i-1}),\quad i=1,...,n. \] The main objective of this paper is to study the boundedness of solutions of equation (*). Sufficient conditions and necessary conditions are given for the boundedness of all solutions. For a class of sublinear equations those results combine to a condition which is both necessary and sufficient. In addition, a sufficient condition is obtained for all solutions of (*) to tend to finite limits as \(t\to \infty\). For the homogeneous linear equation (**) \(D^ n(x;1,p_ 1,...,p_ n)=q(t)x\) the situation is characterized in which (**) is stable in the sense that every solution of (**) is bounded together with its quasi-derivatives up to order n-1.