Motivated by a recent surge of interest for Dynkin operators in mathematical physics and by problems in the combinatorial theory of dynamical systems, we propose here a systematic study of logarithmic derivatives in various contexts. In particular, we introduce and investigate generalizations of the Dynkin operator for which we obtain Magnus-type formulas.Keywords Dynkin operator · Free Lie algebras · Logarithmic derivative · Rota-Baxter algebra
IntroductionDynkin operators are usually defined as iterated bracketings. They are particularly popular in the framework of linear differential equations and the so-called continuous Baker-Campbell-Hausdorff problem (to compute the logarithm of an evolution operator). We refer to [17] for details and an historical survey of the field. Dynkin operators can also be expressed as a particular type of logarithmic derivatives (see Corollary 3 below). They have received increasingly more and more interest during recent years, for various reasons.(1) In the theory of free Lie algebras and noncommutative symmetric functions, it was shown that Dynkin operators generate the descent algebra (the direct sum of Solomon's algebras of type A, see [9,17]) and play a crucial role in the theory of Lie idempotents.