Existence and stability of periodic solutions are studied for a system of delay differential equations with two delays, with periodic coefficients. It models the evolution of hematopoietic stem cells and mature neutrophil cells in chronic myelogenous leukemia under a periodic treatment that acts only on mature cells. Existence of a guiding function leads to the proof of the existence of a strictly positive periodic solution by a theorem of Krasnoselskii....

The paper presents a geometric method of finding periodic solutions of retarded functional differential equations (RFDE) $x^{\text{'}}\left(t\right)=f(t,x_t)$, where f is T-periodic in t. We construct a pair of subsets of ℝ × ℝⁿ called a T-periodic block and compute its Lefschetz number. If it is nonzero, then there exists a T-periodic solution.

It is quite natural to conjecture that a positively homogeneous function with degree d ≥ 2 on ${ℝ}^N$ satisfies the Łojasiewicz gradient inequality with exponent θ = 1/d without any need for an analyticity assumption. We show that this property is true under some additional hypotheses, but not always, even for N = 2.