Centre for Differential Equations, Continuum Mechanics and Applications, School of Computational and Applied Mathematics, University of the Witwatersrand, Private Bag 3, Wits 2050, Johannesburg, South Africa
Academic Editor: Fazal M. Mahomed
Copyright © 2012 K. S. Mahomed and E. Momoniat. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Abstract
Symmetries of the fundamental first integrals for scalar second-order ordinary differential equations (ODEs) which are linear or linearizable by point transformations have already been obtained. Firstly we show how one can determine the relationship between the symmetries and the first integrals of linear or linearizable scalar ODEs of order two. Secondly, a complete classification of point symmetries of first integrals of such linear ODEs is studied. As a consequence, we provide a counting theorem for the point symmetries of first integrals of scalar linearizable second-order ODEs. We show that there exists the 0-, 1-, 2-, or 3-point symmetry cases. It is shown that the maximal algebra case is unique.