For a two parameter family of C3 diffeomorphisms having a homoclinic orbit of tangency derived from a horseshoe, the relationship between the measure of the parameter values at which the diffeomorphism (restricted to a certain compact invariant set containing the horseshoe) is not expansive and the Hausdorff dimension of the horseshoe associated to the homoclinic orbit of tangency is investigated. This is a simple application of the Newhouse-Palis-Takens-Yoccoz theory.

We prove that all Liouville's tori generic bifurcations of a large class of two degrees of freedom integrable Hamiltonian systems (the so called Jacobi–Moser–Mumford systems) are nondegenerate in the sense of Bott. Thus, for such systems, Fomenko's theory [4] can be applied (we give the example of Gel'fand–Dikii's system). We also check the Bott property for two interesting systems: the Lagrange top and the geodesic flow on an ellipsoid.

In this paper, we study the local bifurcations of critical periods in the neighborhood of a nondegenerate centre of the reduced Kukles system. We find at the same time the isochronous systems. We show that at most three local critical periods bifurcate from the Christopher-Lloyd centres of finite order, at most two from the linear isochrone and at most one critical period from the nonlinear isochrone. Moreover, in all cases, there exist perturbations which lead to the maximum number of critical periods. We determine the isochrones, using the method of Darboux: the linearizing transformation of an isochrone is derived from the expression of the first integral. Our approach is a combination of computational algebraic techniques (Gröbner bases, theory of the resultant, Sturm’s algorithm), the theory of ideals of noetherian rings and the transversality theory of algebraic curves.

In this paper we study the local bifurcation of critical periods of periodic orbits in the neighborhood of a nondegenerate centre of a vector field with a homogeneous nonlinearity of the third degree. We show that at most three local critical periods bifurcate from a weak linear centre of finite order or from the linear isochrone and at most two local critical periods from the nonlinear isochrone. Moreover, in both cases, there are perturbations with the maximum number of critical periods.