Integrability and non-integrability of periodic non-autonomous Lyness recurrences

This paper studies non-autonomous Lyness-type recurrences of the form x n+2 = (a n + x n+1 )/x n , where {a n } is a k-periodic sequence of positive numbers with primitive period k. We show that for the cases k ∈ {1, 2, 3, 6}, the behaviour of the sequence {x n } is simple (integrable), while for the remaining cases satisfying this behaviour can be much more complicated (chaotic). We also show that the cases where k is a multiple of 5 present some different features. © 2013 Copyright Taylor and Francis Group, LLC.