# Painlevé transcendents

In mathematics, Painlevé transcendents are solutions to certain nonlinear second-order ordinary differential equations in the complex plane with the Painlevé property (the only movable singularities are poles), but which are not generally solvable in terms of elementary functions. They are named for the French mathematican (and prime minister) Paul Painlevé who found them around 1900.

History

Painlevé transcendents have their origin in the study of special functions, which often arise as solutions of differential equations, as well as in the study of isomonodromic deformations of linear differential equations. One of the most useful classes of special functions are the elliptic functions. They are defined by second order ordinary differential equations whose singularities have the Painlevé property: the only movable singularities are poles. This property is shared by all linear ordinary differential equations but is rare in nonlinear equations. Poincare and L. Fuchs showed that any first order equation with the Painlevé property can be transformed into the Weierstrass equation or the Riccati equation, which can all be solved explicitly in terms of integration and previously known special functions. Émile Picard pointed out that for orders greater than 1, movable essential singularities can occur, and tried and failed to find new examples with the Painleve property. (For orders greater than 2 the solutions can have moving natural boundaries.) Around 1900, Paul Painlevé studied second order differential equations with no movable singularities. He found that up to certain transformations, every such equation of the form

:$y^\left\{primeprime\right\}=R\left(y^\left\{prime\right\},y,t\right)$

(with "R" a rational function) can be put into one of fifty "canonical forms" (listed in | year=1991 | volume=149.

The Painlevé equations are all reductions of the self dual Yang-Mills equations.

References

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*dlmf|id=32
*Kanehisa Takasaki [http://www.math.h.kyoto-u.ac.jp/~takasaki/soliton-lab/chron/painleve.html Painlevé Equations]
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