Autonomous system (mathematics)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

In differential equations, an autonomous system is an equation of the form

where x takes values in n-dimensional Euclidean space and t is usually time. It is distinguished from systems of differential equations of the form

in which the law governing the rate of motion of a particle depends not only on the particle's location, but also on time; such systems are not autonomous.

The original article can be found at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_system_(mathematics).
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.