Jacobi's Bound: Jacobi's results translated in Kőnig's, Egerváry's and Ritt's mathematical languages.

Jacobi's results on the computation of the order and of the normal forms of a differential system are translated in the formalism of differential algebra. In the quasi-regular case, we give complete proofs according to Jacobi's arguments. The main result is Jacobi's bound, still conjectural in the general case: the order of a differential system P 1 , ... , P n is not greater than the maximum O of the sums ∑ i = 1 n a i , σ (i) , for all permutations σ of the indices, where a i , j : = ord x j P i , viz. the tropical determinant of the matrix (a i , j) . The order is precisely equal to O iff Jacobi's truncated determinant does not vanish. Jacobi also gave a polynomial time algorithm to compute O , similar to Kuhn's "Hungarian method" and some variants of shortest path algorithms, related to the computation of integers ℓ i such that a normal form may be obtained, in the generic case, by differentiating ℓ i times equation P i . Fundamental results about changes of orderings and the various normal forms a system may have, including differential resolvents, are also provided. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]