This paper provides an original rendition of the heavy top that unravels the mysteries behind S. Kowalewski’s seminal work on the motions of a rigid body around a fixed point under the influence of gravity. The point of departure for understanding Kowalewski’s work begins with Kirchhoff’s model for the equilibrium configurations of an elastic rod in ({mathbb{R}}^{3}) subject to fixed bending and twisting moments at its ends [17]. This initial orientation to the elastic problem shows, first, that the Kowalewski type integrals discovered by I. V. Komarov and V. B. Kuznetsov [24, 25] appear naturally on the Lie algebras associated with the orthonormal frame bundles of the sphere (S^{3}) and the hyperboloid (H^{3}) [17] and, secondly, it shows that these integrals of motion can be naturally extracted from a canonical Poisson system on the dual of (so(4,mathbb{C})) generated by an affine quadratic Hamiltonian (H) (Kirchhoff – Kowalewski type).
The paper shows that the passage to complex variables is synonymous with the representation of (so(4,mathbb{C})) as (sl(2,mathbb{C})times sl(2,mathbb{C})) and the embedding of (H) into (sp(4,mathbb{C})), an important intermediate step towards uncovering the origins of Kowalewski’s integral. There is a quintessential Kowalewski type integral of motion on (sp(4,mathbb{C})) that appears as a spectral invariant for the Poisson system associated with a Hamiltonian (mathcal{H}) (a natural extension of (H)) that satisfies Kowalewski’s conditions.
The text then demonstrates the relevance of this integral of motion for other studies in the existing literature [7, 35]. The text also includes a self-contained treatment of the integration of the Kowalewski type equations based on Kowalewski’s ingenuous separation of variables, the hyperelliptic curve and the solutions on its Jacobian variety.
