Conservation laws by symmetries and adjoint symmetries

Abstract

Conservation laws are fomulated for systems of differential equations by using symmetries and adjoint symmetries, and an application to systems of evolution equations is made, together with illustrative examples. The formulation does not require the existence of a Lagrangian for a given system, and the presented examples include computations of conserved densities for the heat equation, Burgers' equation and the Korteweg-de Vries equation.