A direct approach to the construction of standard and non-standard Lagrangians for dissipative dynamical systems with variable coefficients

Abstract

We present a direct approach to the construction of Lagrangians for a large class of one-dimensional dynamical systems with a simple dependence (monomial or polynomial) on the velocity. We rederive and generalize some recent results and find Lagrangian formulations which seem to be new. Some of the considered systems (e.g., motions with the friction proportional to the velocity and to the square of the velocity) admit infinite families of different Lagrangian formulations.