On the transformations of the dynamical equations

Abstract

In this issue we bring to the reader’s attention a translation of Levi-Civita’s work “Sulle trasformazioni delle equazioni dinamiche”. This paper, written by Levi-Civita at the onset of his career, is remarkable in many respects. Both the main result and the method developed in the paper brought the author in line with the greatest mathematicians of his day and seriously influenced the further progress of geometry and the theory of integrable systems. Speaking modern language the main result of his paper is the deduction of the general geodesic equivalence equation in invariant form and local classification of geodesically equivalent Riemannian metrics in the case of arbitrary dimension, i.e., metrics having the same geodesics considered as unparameterized curves (this classification problem was formulated by Beltrami in 1865). Levi-Civita’s work produced a great impact on further development of the theory of geodesically equivalent metrics and geodesic mappings, and still remains one of the most important tools in this area of differential geometry.