Stability is among the most important concepts in dynamical systems. Local stability is well-studied, whereas determining the ‘global stability’ of a nonlinear system is very challenging. Over the last few decades, many different ideas have been developed to address this issue, primarily driven by concrete applications. In particular, several disciplines suggested a web of concepts under the headline ‘resilience’. Unfortunately, there are many different variants and explanations of resilience, and often, the definitions are left relatively vague, sometimes even deliberately. Yet, to allow for a structural development of a mathematical theory of resilience that can be used across different areas, one has to ensure precise starting definitions and provide a mathematical comparison of different resilience measures. In this work, we provide a systematic review of the most relevant indicators of resilience in the context of continuous dynamical systems, grouped according to their mathematical features. The indicators are also generalised to be applicable to any attractor. These steps are important to ensure a more reliable, quantitatively comparable and reproducible study of resilience in dynamical systems. Furthermore, we also develop a new concept of resilience against certain nonautonomous perturbations to demonstrate how one can naturally extend our framework. All the indicators are finally compared via the analysis of a classic scalar model from population dynamics to show that direct quantitative application-based comparisons are an immediate consequence of a detailed mathematical analysis.

For linear stochastic differential equations with bounded coefficients, we establish the robustness of nonuniform mean-square exponential dichotomy (NMS-ED) on $[t_{0},\,+\infty )$, $(-\infty,\,t_{0}]$ and the whole ${\Bbb R}$ separately, in the sense that such an NMS-ED persists under a sufficiently small linear perturbation. The result for the nonuniform mean-square exponential contraction is also discussed. Moreover, in the process of proving the existence of NMS-ED, we use the observation that the projections of the ‘exponential growing solutions’ and the ‘exponential decaying solutions’ on $[t_{0},\,+\infty )$, $(-\infty,\,t_{0}]$ and ${\Bbb R}$ are different but related. Thus, the relations of three types of projections on $[t_{0},\,+\infty )$, $(-\infty,\,t_{0}]$ and ${\Bbb R}$ are discussed.

For linear differential systems, the Sacker–Sell spectrum (dichotomy spectrum) and the contractible set are the same. However, we claim that this is not true for the linear difference equations. A counterexample is given. For the convenience of research, we study the relations between the dichotomy spectrum and the contractible set under the framework on time scales. In fact, by a counterexample, we show that the contractible set could be different from dichotomy spectrum on time scales established by Siegmund [J. Comput. Appl. Math., 2002]. Furthermore, we find that there is no bijection between them. In particular, for the linear difference equations, the contractible set is not equal to the dichotomy spectrum. To counter this mismatch, we propose a new notion called generalized contractible set and we prove that the generalized contractible set is exactly the dichotomy spectrum. Our approach is based on roughness theory and Perron's transformation. In this paper, a new method for roughness theory on time scales is provided. Moreover, we provide a time-scaled version of the Perron's transformation. However, the standard argument is invalid for Perron's transformation. Thus, some novel techniques should be employed to deal with this problem. Finally, an example is given to verify the theoretical results.

Vertically vibrating a liquid bath may allow a self-propelled wave-particle entity to move on its free surface. The horizontal dynamics of this walking droplet, under the constraint of an external drag force, can be described adequately by an integro-differential trajectory equation. For a sinusoidal wave field, this equation is equivalent to a closed three-dimensional system of nonlinear ODEs. We explicitly define a stability boundary for the system and a quantised criterion for its partial integrability in the meromorphic category.

In this paper, we are interested in investigating notions of stability for generalized linear differential equations (GLDEs). Initially, we propose and revisit several definitions of stability and provide a complete characterization of them in terms of upper bounds and asymptotic behaviour of the transition matrix. In addition, we illustrate our stability results for GLDEs to linear periodic systems and linear impulsive differential equations. Finally, we prove that the well-known definitions of uniform asymptotic stability and variational asymptotic stability are equivalent to the global uniform exponential stability introduced in this article.

We present sufficient conditions under which a given linear nonautonomous system and its nonlinear perturbation are topologically conjugated. Our conditions are of a very general form and provided that the nonlinear perturbations are well-behaved, we do not assume any asymptotic behaviour of the linear system. Moreover, the control on the nonlinear perturbations may differ along finitely many mutually complementary directions. We consider both the cases of one-sided discrete and continuous dynamics.

In this paper we introduce new birth-and-death processes with partial catastrophe and study some of their properties. In particular, we obtain some estimates for the mean catastrophe time, and the first and second moments of the distribution of the process at a fixed time t. This is completed by some asymptotic results.

We show that all self-adjoint extensions of semibounded Sturm–Liouville operators with limit-circle endpoint(s) can be obtained via an additive singular form-bounded self-adjoint perturbation of rank equal to the deficiency indices, say $d\in \{1,2\}$. This characterization generalizes the well-known analog for semibounded Sturm–Liouville operators with regular endpoints. Explicitly, every self-adjoint extension of the minimal operator can be written as

$$ \begin{align*} \boldsymbol{A}_{ {}_{\scriptstyle \Theta}}=\boldsymbol{A}_0+\mathbf{B}\Theta\mathbf{B}^*, \end{align*} $$

$\boldsymbol {A}_0$

$\Theta $

$\mathbb {C}^d$

$\boldsymbol {A}_0$

$\mathcal {H}_{-1}(\boldsymbol {A}_0)$

$\Theta $

The merging of boundary triples with perturbation theory provides a more holistic view of the operator’s matrix-valued spectral measures: identifying not just the location of the spectrum, but also certain directional information.

As an example, self-adjoint extensions of the classical Jacobi differential equation (which has two limit-circle endpoints) are obtained, and their spectra are analyzed with tools both from the theory of boundary triples and perturbation theory.

Let f be a smooth symplectic diffeomorphism of ${\mathbb R}^2$ admitting a (non-split) separatrix associated to a hyperbolic fixed point. We prove that if f is a perturbation of the time-1 map of a symplectic autonomous vector field, this separatrix is accumulated by a positive measure set of invariant circles. However, we provide examples of smooth symplectic diffeomorphisms with a Lyapunov unstable non-split separatrix that are not accumulated by invariant circles.

In this paper, we extend to the non-Hille–Yosida case a variation of constants formula for a nonautonomous and nonhomogeneous Cauchy problems first obtained by Gühring and Räbiger. By using this variation of constants formula, we derive a necessary and sufficient condition for the existence of an exponential dichotomy for the evolution family generated by the associated nonautonomous homogeneous problem. We also prove a persistence result of the exponential dichotomy for small perturbations. Finally, we illustrate our results by considering two examples. The first example is a parabolic equation with nonlocal and nonautonomous boundary conditions, and the second example is an age-structured model that is a hyperbolic equation.

Let $(A_m)_{m \in {\mathop Z}}$ be a sequence of bounded linear maps acting on an arbitrary Banach space X and admitting an exponential trichotomy and let $f_m:X \to X$ be a Lispchitz map for every $m\in {\mathop Z} $. We prove that whenever the Lipschitz constants of $f_m$, $m \in {\mathop Z} $, are uniformly small, the nonautonomous dynamics given by $x_{m+1}=A_mx_m+f_m(x_m)$, $m\in {\mathop Z} $, has various types of shadowing. Moreover, if X is finite dimensional and each $A_m$ is invertible we prove that a converse result is also true. Furthermore, we get similar results for one-sided and continuous time dynamics. As applications of our results, we study the Hyers–Ulam stability for certain difference equations and we obtain a very general version of the Grobman–Hartman's theorem for nonautonomous dynamics.

We propose and analyse an age-structured model for within-host HIV virus dynamics which is incorporated with both virus-to-cell and cell-to-cell infection routes, and proliferations of both uninfected and infected cells in the form of logistic growth. The model turns out to be a hybrid system with two differential-integral equations and one first-order partial differential equation. We perform some rigorous analyses for the considered model. Among the interesting dynamical behaviours of the model is the occurrence of backward bifurcation in terms of the basic reproduction number R0 at R0 = 1, which raises new challenges for effective infection control. We also discuss the cause of such a backward bifurcation, based on our analytical results.

We study the differentiability properties of the topological equivalence between a uniformly asymptotically stable linear nonautonomous system and a perturbed system with suitable nonlinearities. For this purpose, we construct a homeomorphism inspired in the Palmer's one restricted to the positive half line, studying additional continuity properties and providing sufficient conditions ensuring its Cr–smoothness.

Let q be a positive integer and let (an) and (bn) be two given ℂ-valued and q-periodic sequences. First we prove that the linear recurrence in ℂ 0.1

$$x_{n + 2} = a_nx_{n + 1} + b_nx_n,\quad n\in {\open Z}_+ $$

0.2

$$A_n = \left( {\matrix{ 0 & 1 \cr {b_n} & {a_n} \cr } } \right)\quad n\in {\open Z}_+ .$$

0.3

$${x}^{\prime \prime}(t) = a(t){x}^{\prime}(t) + b(t)x(t),\quad t\in {\open R},$$

0.4

$${X}^{\prime}(t) = A(t)X(t),\quad t\in {\open R},\quad X(0) = I_2,$$

0.5

$$A(t) = \left( {\matrix{ 0 & 1 \cr {b(t)} & {a(t)} \cr } } \right),\quad t\in {\open R}.$$

We show uniform-in-time propagation of algebraic and stretched exponential moments for the Becker--Döring equations. Our proof is based upon a suitable use of the maximum principle together with known rates of convergence to equilibrium.

A classification of the behaviour of the solutions f(·, a) to the ordinary differential equation (|f′|p-2f′)′ + f - |f′|p-1 = 0 in (0,∞) with initial condition f(0, a) = a and f′(0, a) = 0 is provided, according to the value of the parameter a > 0 when the exponent p takes values in (1, 2). There is a threshold value a* that separates different behaviours of f(·, a): if a > a*, then f(·, a) vanishes at least once in (0,∞) and takes negative values, while f(·, a) is positive in (0,∞) and decays algebraically to zero as r→∞ if a ∊ (0, a*). At the threshold value, f(·, a*) is also positive in (0,∞) but decays exponentially fast to zero as r→∞. The proof of these results relies on a transformation to a first-order ordinary differential equation and a monotonicity property with respect to a > 0. This classification is one step in the description of the dynamics near the extinction time of a diffusive Hamilton–Jacobi equation with critical gradient absorption and fast diffusion.

The signal transduction pathway is the important process of communication of the cells. It is the dynamical interaction between the ligand-receptor complexes and an inhibitor protein in second messenger synthesis. The signaling molecules are detected and bounded by receptors, typically G-Protein receptors, across the cell membrane and that in turns alerts intracellular molecules to stimulate a response or a desired consequence in the target cells. In this research, we consider a model of the signal transduction process consisting of a system of three differential equations which involve the dynamic interaction between an inhibitor protein and the ligand-receptor complexes in the second messenger synthesis. We will incorporate a delay τ in the time needed before the signal amplification process can take effect on the production of the ligand-receptor complex. We investigate persistence and stability of the system. It is shown that the system allows positive solutions and the positive equilibrium is locally asymptotically stable under suitable conditions on the system parameters.

It is well known that along any stable manifold the dynamics travels with an exponential rate. Moreover, this rate is close to the slowest exponential rate along the stable direction of the linearization, provided that the nonlinear part is sufficiently small. In this note, we show that whenever there is also a fastest finite exponential rate along the stable direction of the linearization, similarly we can establish a lower bound for the speed of the nonlinear dynamics along the stable manifold. We consider both cases of discrete and continuous time, as well as a nonuniform exponential behaviour.