Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

In the last few years many problems of mathematical and physical interest, which may not be Hamiltonian or even dynamical, were solved using techniques from integrable systems. I will review some of these techniques and their connections to some open research problems.

A recent lower bound on the number of edges in a k-critical n-vertex graph by Kostochka and Yancey yields a half-page proof of the celebrated Grotzsch Theorem that every planar triangle-free graph is 3-colorable. We use the same bound to give short proofs of other known theorems on 3-coloring of planar graphs, among whose is the Grunbaum-Aksenov Theorem that every planar with at most three triangles is 3-colorable. We also prove the new result that every graph obtained from a triangle-free planar graph by adding a vertex of degree at most four is 3-colorable. Joint work with O. Borodin, A. Kostochka and M. Yancey.

We study the ordinary differential equation \varepsilon \ddot x + \dot x + \varepsilon g(x) = \e f(\omega t), with f and g analytic and f quasi-periodic in t with frequency vector \omega\in\mathds{R}^{d}. We show that if there exists c_{0}\in\mathds{R} such that g(c_{0}) equals the average of f and the first non-zero derivative of g at c_{0} is of odd order \mathfrak{n}, then, for \varepsilon small enough and under very mild Diophantine conditions on \omega, there exists a quasi-periodic solution "response solution" close to c_{0}, with the same frequency vector as f. In particular if f is a trigonometric polynomial the Diophantine condition on \omega can be completely removed. Moreover we show that for \mathfrak{n}=1 such a solution depends analytically on \e in a domain of the complex plane tangent more than quadratically to the imaginary axis at the origin. These results have been obtained in collaboration with Roberto Feola (Universit\`a di Roma ``La Sapienza'') and Guido Gentile (Universit\`a di Roma Tre).