We generalize Hopf’s theorem to thermostats: the total thermostat curvature of a thermostat without conjugate points is non-positive and vanishes only if the thermostat curvature is identically zero. We further show that, if the thermostat curvature is zero, then the flow has no conjugate points and the Green bundles collapse almost everywhere. Given a thermostat without conjugate points, we prove that the Green bundles are transverse everywhere if and only if it is projectively Anosov. Finally, we provide an example showing that Hopf’s rigidity theorem on the $2$-torus cannot be extended to thermostats. It is also the first example of a projectively Anosov thermostat which is not Anosov.

Given a smooth compact surface without focal points and of higher genus, it is shown that its geodesic flow is semi-conjugate to a continuous expansive flow with a local product structure such that the semi-conjugation preserves time parametrization. It is concluded that the geodesic flow has a unique measure of maximal entropy.

In 1961, J. Barrett showed that if the first conjugate point ${{\eta }_{1}}\left( a \right)$ exists for the differential equation ${{\left( r\left( x \right){y}'' \right)}^{\prime \prime }}=p\left( x \right)y$ , where $r\left( x \right)\,>\,0$ and $p\left( x \right)\,>\,0$ , then so does the first systems-conjugate point ${{\hat{\eta }}_{1}}\left( a \right)$ . The aim of this note is to extend this result to the general equation with middle term ${{\left( q\left( x \right){y}' \right)}^{\prime }}$ without further restriction on $q\left( x \right)$ , other than continuity.

This errata corrects one error in the 2004 version of this paper [Mennucci, ESAIM: COCV10 (2004) 426–451].