On Elliptical Billiards in the Lobachevsky Space and associated Geodesic Hierarchies

We derive Cayley's type conditions for periodical trajectories for the billiard within an ellipsoid in the Lobachevsky space. It appears that these new conditions are of the same form as those obtained before for the Euclidean case. We explain this coincidence by using theory of geodesically equivalent metrics and show that Lobachevsky and Euclidean elliptic billiards can be naturally considered as a part of a hierarchy of integrable elliptical billiards.Comment: 14 pages, to appear in Journal of Geometry and Physic

On Kapteyn-Kummer Series' Integral Form

In this short research note we obtain double definite integral expressions for the Kapteyn type series built by Kummer's $M$ (or confluent hypergeometric ${}_1F_1$) functions. These kind of series unify in natural way the similar fashion results for Neumann-, Schl\"omilch- and Kapteyn-Bessel series recently established by Pog\'any, S\"uli, Baricz and Jankov Ma\v{s}irevi\'c

An extended Lagrangian formalism

A simple formal procedure makes the main properties of the lagrangian binomial extendable to functions depending to any kind of order of the time--derivatives of the lagrangian coordinates. Such a broadly formulated binomial can provide the lagrangian components, in the classical sense of the Newton's law, for a quite general class of forces. At the same time, the generalized equations of motions recover some of the classical alternative formulations of the Lagrangian equations

Cetaev condition for nonlinear nonholonomic systems and homogeneous constraints

We first present a way to formulate the equations of motion for a nonholonomic system with nonlinear constraints with respect to the velocities. The formulation is based on the Cetaev condition which aims to extend the practical method of virtual displacements from the holonomic case to the nonlinear nonholonomic one. The condition may appear in a certain sense artificial and motivated only to coherently generalize that concerning the holonomic case. In the second part we show that for a specific category of nonholonomic constraints (homogeneous functions with respect to the generalized velocities) the Cetaev condition reveals the same physical meaning that emerges in systems with holonomic constraints. In particular the aspect of the mechanical energy associable to the system is analysed

A simple approach to nonlinear nonholonomic systems with several examples

The main theme of the article is the study of discrete systems of material points subjected to constraints not only of a geometric type (holonomic constraints) but also of a kinematic type (nonholonomic constraints). The setting up of the equations of motion follows a simple principle which generalizes the holonomic case. Furthermore, attention is paid to the fact that the kinematic variables retain their velocity meaning, without resorting to the pseudo-velocity technique. Particular situations are examined in which the modeling of the constraints can be carried out in several ways to evaluate their effective equivalence. Numerous examples, many of which taken from the most recurring ones in the literature, are provided in order to illustrate the proposed theory